Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  Richard had an unending repertoire of anecdotes and an enviable spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.

  ‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to cradle.’

  6 April. Were there a suitable forum I would put in my own word for Dennis Stevenson, currently being pilloried with his colleagues for the collapse of HBOS. In the early 1990s when I was a trustee of the National Gallery Stevenson was a trustee of the Tate and must have seen me arriving at one or other of those institutions on my bike. I had no helmet in those days really because it made me look such a twerp. However one day a car arrived at the house and the chauffeur knocked at the door with a box so light I thought it could only be an orchid. It turned out to be a white crash helmet with a note from Dennis Stevenson saying how his son (with no helmet) had been knocked off his bike and suffered epilepsy as a result, though happily not permanently. Since then if he saw anyone he knew without a helmet he bought them one. So in this particular instance I won’t be joining in the howls of indignation.

  8 April. The morning spent paying bills: British Gas (and electricity), Thames Water, Yorkshire Water, Camden Council, Craven District Council and Mr Redhead the coal merchant in Ingleton. Many of the bills are overdue, about which I am unrepentant. The only one I pay promptly and with no feeling of resentment is Mr Redhead’s.

  It wasn’t always so. Before the public utilities were privatised one paid bills more readily, not just because they were considerably cheaper, which of course they were, but because one had little sense of being exploited. Now as I pay my water bills for instance, I think of their overpaid executives and the shareholders to whom the profits go and I know, despite the assurances of all such companies, that they are charging what they know they can get away with. Competition has not meant better service nor has it brought down prices, with some corporate behaviour close to sharp practice. British Gas, for instance, regularly omits to send me a first bill but only a reminder, which has no details about consumption. When challenged they say this may be because bills have been sent online. But how can this be when we have no computer? If one telephones and manages eventually to get through one is dealt with by someone always charming and even-tempered (and often Scots) who promises to look into it. But when in due course the bill comes again it is still with no details and coupled with threats of court action. So whereas once upon a time I paid my bills as Auden said a gentleman should, as soon as they were submitted, these days I put them off, paying sometimes only at the third or fourth time of asking or when I am assured (rhetorically, I know) that the bailiffs are about to call. I am no crusader but I wish there was a consumers’ organisation which could co-ordinate individual resistance to these companies, setting up non- or late payment on such a scale that it would put a dent in the dividends of the shareholders and the salaries of the executives concerned.

  This was written a few hours before I learned of Lady Thatcher’s death and it’s an appropriate epitaph.

  12 April. Each day brings new revelations about those due to attend The Funeral. One inevitable invitee, now of course unavailable, would have been Jimmy Savile.

  17 April. Shots of the cabinet and the ex-cabinet at Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s just emphasise how consistently cowardly most of them were, the only time they dared to stand up to her when eventually they kicked her out. What also galls is the notion that Tory MPs throw in almost as an afterthought, namely that her lack of a sense of humour was just a minor failing, of no more significance than being colourblind, say, or mildly short-sighted. In fact to have no sense of humour is to be a seriously flawed human being. It’s not a minor shortcoming; it shuts you off from humanity. Mrs Thatcher was a mirthless bully and should have been buried, as once upon a time monarchs used to be, in the depths of the night.

  22 April. Some signs from his latest contribution to the LRB that Karl Miller is coming round to Mrs Thatcher now that she’s safely in the grave. He quotes in order to disagree with it a remark by Jonathan M. (his brother-in-law) about Mrs Thatcher being vulgar. J. whom we saw yesterday was understandably miffed, not remembering the remark or thinking it in the least bit witty. He would have preferred Karl to recall his description of Mrs Thatcher’s voice as being ‘like a perfumed fart’ and though I don’t relish the role of Jonathan’s Boswell I do think that is worth remembering.

  If in the future anyone remarks on how young I look I shan’t, as I generally do, mumble about having kept my hair; I shall say ‘I put it down to/blame (or thank) the involuntary celibacy of my youth’, which is nearer the truth.

  3 May. I am reading Neil MacGregor’s Shakespeare’s Restless World. It’s very good, even overcoming my (A. L. Rowse-generated) prejudice against reading about Shakespeare. I hadn’t realised at Richard Griffiths’s funeral in Stratford that Shakespeare’s father had been buried in the churchyard, the whereabouts of the grave now unknown. So when, waiting for the service to start, I went out for a pee under one of the yews in a sheltered corner of the cemetery I may well have been pissing on Shakespeare’s dad’s grave. More decorously, Richard’s massive coffin was resting where presumably Shakespeare’s coffin rested, a notion that would have pleased him though at the service it goes unremarked.

  15 May. Starlings. Slightly sweaty birds. Two in the garden at the moment. They have the look of a threadbare maitre d’ who hangs up his tailcoat shiny with age in his cheap lodgings every night. Cocky, too, of course, a thumbs-in-the-lapels sort of bird.

  20 May. One of the many depressing features of George Osborne is that his rhetoric about the poor and supposedly shiftless can be traced in a direct line to exactly similar statements voiced in the seventeenth century and thereafter. Osborne may well be proud of being part of such a long tradition though I doubt, his St Paul’s education notwithstanding, that he’s aware of it.

  2 June, Wiveton. This morning we are having our breakfast outside the hotel room in warm sunshine when we hear a cuckoo, and a cuckoo so persistent it becomes almost a bore, though it’s the first one I’ve heard in two or three years. Finish Ronald Blythe’s The Time by the Sea, an account of the time he spent at Aldeburgh as a young man. A good book, it’s uncritical of the regime, adulatory of Britten and Imogen Holst, though more muted about Pears. The fact is Aldeburgh was a court, and whether the ruler is Henry VIII or Benjamin Britten all courts are the same, with the courtiers anxious to indulge and to anticipate the whims and wishes of the ruler. So good or faithful servants are summarily dismissed or, if the king is prime minister, wars are found pretexts for because that is known to be the great man’s (or woman’s) wish.

  3 June, Norfolk. In Salle Church the war memorial commemorates the dead in two world wars with, as is usual, the dead of the First War far outnumbering the dead of the Second. And particularly so in this case as there is only one local man who was killed in 1939–45. Perhaps because of this or just as a measure of economy the memorial reads, ‘In grateful remembrance of the men of Salle who died in the Great Wars’, the final ‘s’ plainly added much later. Nowhere else have I seen the Second War called a ‘great’ war.

  7 June. En route for Leeds I’ve just finished my sandwiches (smoked salmon with dill sauce) when Tony Harrison comes down the train looking for a loo that works and preferably not one of the revolving-doored jobs that are wont to expose you to the next entrant. He’s on his way to Leeds for the Beeston Festival and also to take another look at his father’s now (thanks to V) famous grave which these days is quite showily signposted as it gets so many visitors. He’s easy to talk to and though I miss my nap (and doing the crossword) it’s a pleasure to see him and gossip – though Dinah W., who’s his editor as well as mine, keeps me up to date. On his new knees for instance, which he recommends, and the care the Brotherton Libr
ary is giving to his manuscripts, including a specially assigned (and apparently quite notable) bibliophile with whom he is working to put them in order.

  10 June. I read somewhere that the Romans used to crucify tigers to discourage others of their species from preying on humankind. On much the same principle, though less epically, gamekeepers nailed up the carcasses of crows and moles. Nobody, so far anyway, has suggested nailing up the culled carcasses of badgers, though it might be as effective as what DEFRA is doing already.

  21 June. Read the proof copy of Nina Stibbe’s diary of her time as nanny at Mary-Kay’s. It’s fresh and droll with Nina’s personality coming through very clearly. Sam and Will are funny (and funny together) as is Mary-Kay. I on the other hand am solid, dependable and dull, my contributions always full of good sense; I am said to be good at mending bikes (not true) and at diagnosing malfunctioning electrical appliances (certainly not true). None of this I mind much, though it is painful to be even so lightheartedly misremembered. I am the voice of reason, something of which I’ve never hitherto been accused. I’m also a dismal Jimmy who periodically puts in an appearance as like as not (and this at least is fair) bearing a rice pudding. Much is made of the charms of turkey mince which I never recall being offered and which, had I been, I would certainly have refused. Such is art.

  22 June, Yorkshire. Around seven I look out of the window and there are six pheasants on the wall, two cocks, four hens, reminding me of the time when Mam, in the middle of a bout of depression, called upstairs to say there were three huge birds on the wall. I called back that she was imagining things and came crossly down to find that she was right, only in those days the birds were peacocks from the Hall. Today the pheasants don’t hang about, two of them skidding down the sloping roof of the hut like ski jumpers and launching themselves into space before stepping fastidiously round the garden expecting to be fed.

  8 July. I’d be happy if Andy Murray had to play his final every Sunday as on a perfect day of continual sunshine the village has been quiet, the roads empty the only similar street-clearing event the obsequies of Princess Diana and when in the late afternoon we go over to Wigglesworth to have tea at Gardenmakers we find Andrew and Hilary having their own solitary tea in the garden. Not that I’m a fan of Murray and it’s depressing to find his grim grimacing determination has paid off, a triumph of grit over grace – not that anyone in tennis has much grace these days (as if I knew [or cared]).

  14 July. To Stainburn where the church is unexpectedly open as it hasn’t been in all the years I’ve been going up to sit in the churchyard. Simpler inside than I’d remembered as in memory I’d endowed it with a three-decker pulpit, whereas it’s just cut down and on one level. Good simple seventeenth-century pews, three or four with finials but mostly with simply roll-top mouldings and marks on the simple king post above the Norman chancel which suggest there was once a rood.

  The guide book claims the porch is seventeenth-century which it may well be but the niche for a statue over the door must be older, as seems the moulding with blurred heads below it.

  Sit on the seat for twenty minutes or so with just one swallow for company. Then to Leeds where R. is on time and we have delicious fish and chips.

  16 July. A book review in the LRB by Jonathan Coe of The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson edited by Harry Mount kicks off with some remarks about the so-called satire boom of the early 1960s. It recalls John Bird’s The Last Laugh, the Cambridge Footlights revue of 1959 (which I saw) and while recognising that it was too radical to be very funny, claims ‘it was undoubtedly a strong influence on Peter Cook (one of the original cast members)’, implying, I think, that in Beyond the Fringe, staged the following year, Peter was pushed in the general direction of satirical comedy. I don’t think this was quite the case, rather that John Bird’s show confirmed Peter’s reluctance to have anything to do with any subject, be it satire or not, which was not funny. Coe instances Peter’s lines in ‘Civil War’, the sketch that opened the second half of Beyond the Fringe. When Moore ‘voices disbelief that a four-minute warning would be enough’ – in the case of a nuclear attack – ‘Cook drawlingly retorts: “I’d remind those doubters that some people in this great country of ours can run a mile in four minutes.”’

  I feel both small-minded and obsessive in being able to recall this after more than fifty years, but the four-minute joke was not Peter’s but mine. Peter’s more characteristic contribution to the sketch and its uproarious ending was when, in accordance with official instructions on what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion, he got into a large brown paper bag.

  Coe also says that in Beyond the Fringe ‘the tensions and contradictions inherent in the movement were already visible.’ This is certainly true, and I learned early on that one had to be quite defensive of one’s own material lest it be usurped by colleagues. Peter, who was by far the most prolific of the four of us, was already in 1960 established as a successful sketch writer for revues in the West End. This meant that at that time he had no wish to offend an audience and shied away from sketches that did. It was only later in his career that, as his humour became more anarchic and audiences in their turn more fawning and in on the joke, he ceased to care. Showbiz dies hard and in these toothless stand-up days I think Peter might just have liked Jeremy Hardy but would have drawn the line at Stewart Lee.

  19 July. Depressed by the latest government privatisation as the NHS-owned company supplying safe blood plasma is sold off to a US firm which is ultimately owned by Mitt Romney and so likely to be asset-stripped and disposed of. The clowns who have come up with this wheeze in the Department of Health, including the simpering Jeremy Hunt, have presumably no knowledge of the history of the NHS and the part played in it by the blood transfusion service. Richard Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship (1970) demonstrated conclusively that voluntary and unpaid blood donation was in itself the greatest safeguard against the contamination of blood such as occurs in the US where blood is a commodity and so sold by anyone anxious to make a quick buck. While this sell-off by the Department of Health hasn’t yet negated the voluntary principle it’s the beginning. And what reassurances are there that the supply of plasma will continue to be as free as it is under the NHS? When will fees be introduced and, when they are, whom will the hapless Hunt blame? The NHS.

  21 July. Now find myself enrolled in the campaign to save some of Smithfield Market from developers, the culprits the planning committee of the Corporation of London. Who are these people? Where do they live that they so blithely sanction the wrecking of yet another corner of London? Their names and addresses should be printed alongside the senseless decisions they make. Safe in Surrey, I imagine, or the Chilterns and nowhere near the architectural rubbish tips they sanction.

  The decision about Smithfield will presumably end up on the desk of the planning minister, Eric Pickles, a native of Bradford. In the 1960s Bradford, having already castrated itself via a motorway welcomed into its very guts, embarked on a programme of wholesale destructions which included the delightful covered market in Kirkgate. Bradford’s neighbour and rival, Leeds, was slightly more canny and did not demolish its own City Market, which is now, forty years later, one of the showplaces of the city. One might hope that Mr Pickles will have learned from experience but like the rest of the coalition he is doubtless in the grip of ideology and ideology drives out thought. [Except that Mr Pickles ended up making the right decision.]

  16 August. I give R. a lift down to what Tristram P. calls The Square, the private garden (with a passage under the Marylebone Road) where the Powells played as children, as did Joan Collins. I like doing this and it’s not a chore (which R. never quite believes) as en route we pass personal trainers and their clients working round the running track, then the giraffes and then (a relatively new addition) occasional glimpses of the reindeer. Both animals, particularly the giraffes, have a touch of melancholy – though whether theirs or mine I’m not sure. What I imagine they miss is ‘the joy of living’, wak
ing every morning to the same enclosure and never running free.

  17 August. Remember being rebuked when I was young for being impertinent. At Exeter by Dacre Balsdon, the senior tutor, for instance. I don’t remember being especially wounded by this and it’s only waking in the night that I realise anybody who accuses anyone of being impertinent is themselves stamped as pompous. Like ‘disappointing’ it’s a schoolmasterish word.

  ‘Pertinent’ not the opposite of ‘impertinent’, which would rather be ‘irrelevant’ or ‘inappropriate’. These are the kind of verbal and grammatical musings I at one point thought of giving to HMQ in The Uncommon Reader. I suppose she’s of all people in a position to dismiss someone as ‘impertinent’.

  18 August. Watching the run-through of the touring version of People at the National I reflect that there isn’t much swearing in my plays. I imagine the characters in a play by Mark Ravenhill, say, get through more ‘fucks’ in the first five minutes than there are in my entire oeuvre. The first time I wrote ‘fuck’ in a script was in my second play, Getting On, and Kenneth More, who was the star (and swore all the time himself), refused to say it on the understandable grounds that it would reduce the takings at the matinées, and since he was on a percentage this mattered.

  9 September. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford i.e. 1954–7 we had a category (we were quite fond of pigeon-holing people) called merry. Merries were the sort of undergraduates who rode sitting up on the back seats of open cars, blew trumpets in the street and welcomed any occasion to dress up. Early fans of Brideshead toted teddy bears and the merries were always at their worst in a punt. Reminded of this long-forgotten category by the Last Night of the Proms, an overwhelmingly merry occasion – and licensed by the BBC to be so. Once it was tolerated, now it’s catered for; in much the same way, the high jinks that for some signalled the end of Final Schools at Oxford, which were spontaneous and occasionally quite destructive with lawns, rooms, ancient surfaces trashed. Nowadays these too are licensed – and there is a photo in this time’s Exeter College bulletin of candidates for the Final Schools being officially trashed afterwards with jinks and imprimatur both quite depressing.