Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  Merries were undergraduates who entered more readily into the role of being an undergraduate.

  23 September. Last night we watch Simon Schama’s Story of the Jews – a series that has been consistently good and last night’s episode superb – linking the yearning and optimism of ‘Over the Rainbow’ and The Wizard of Oz (1940) with the murder of the Jewish population of a small Lithuanian village around the same time who were cooped up in a barn and starved, many of them to death, with the survivors made to dig their own graves before being shot. I think it is the village of his mother’s family but, whether or not, the film of him talking about it, seemingly in the place itself, was unbearable and comparable in intensity with Bronowski picking up the handful of mud at Auschwitz.

  Gordon and I must have seen The Wizard of Oz at the Odeon in the Headrow in Leeds soon after it came out, taken, I imagine, by Aunty Kathleen or Aunty Myra, Mam and Dad not ones for going to the pictures ‘in town’. I was terrified by it – particularly of course by the witch – but the whole set-up made me uneasy. Nearly thirty years later when Forty Years On was playing in the West End, a group of us went one Sunday night to the Talk of the Town, then in Cambridge Circus, to hear Judy Garland. She was at least half an hour late, maybe even longer, and we had almost given up on her when far away – it must have been – fifty yards from the stage we heard her start on ‘Over the Rainbow’. Sentimental and I’m sure contrived though the moment was, it was magical.

  1 October. That so much of what I’ve written has been in the valedictory mode ought to make these latter days seem nothing new. I was saying farewell to the world virtually in my teens and my first play (when I was aged thirty-four) was a lament for an England that has gone. My last play (aged seventy-nine) was still waving the same handkerchief. Better I suppose than always hailing a new dawn.

  I was saying goodbye to the body before I’d even had a taste of it.

  19 October. Back from Yorkshire on a Saturday for a change. We’re used to repairs on the line on a Sunday but today they’re so widespread that nobody at Leeds seems clear about the best way to get to London, one desk suggesting via Sheffield, another via York, so that we eventually get on a Newark train and get off at Doncaster. Here we wait for an hour but it’s warm, and a Saturday afternoon at an empty railway station has seemed to me one well spent ever since I was a boy of fourteen with a Runabout ticket. When it finally arrives the train is from Aberdeen and chugs off at a stately pace with no hint of which way it’s heading. About an hour later I look up to a wonderfully unexpected view as the train slides below the great mass of Lincoln Cathedral, looking like some city in the middle of France. Then as slowly as any little local train it ambles through Lincolnshire past Sleaford and Spalding to Peterborough when at last it puts on speed and we’re back in London by six thirty. Not a wearisome journey at all.

  27 October. All weekend TV and newspapers have been promising a huge storm, a hurricane like that of 1987 when so many trees were uprooted right across southern England. Accordingly airports have been closed, trains cancelled, movables battened down, with many people making no attempt to come into work. And certainly there have been rough seas and one sees the occasional tree down. But if there was wind in the night all it did was rattle the windows with this morning sunny and calm so that one is left feeling both cheated and let down. I was looking forward to a bit of chaos as I’m sure were the media. But nothing as yet and the sun shines in a sky of Mediterranean blue.

  Some footage on the news that tries to make out there has been widespread disruption over the south-west but since the only branches that seem to have fallen across railways are so puny I could pull them off myself it doesn’t convince. Another incident concerns a leylandii that has blown down in a suburban garden, burst the French windows and destroyed … a model train set.

  1 November. Never having worked in the Olivier, coming in for the dress rehearsal for tonight and tomorrow night’s National Theatre Gala I immediately get lost and end up clambering about in the band room. The dressing rooms, when I reach them, are cells arranged round a central well, with the actors often shouting across to one another from their uncurtained cubicles. Coming in this afternoon Maggie Smith said: ‘Oh God. It’s like a women’s prison.’ She didn’t mean just any women’s prison but the penitentiary that used to stand on the corner of Greenwich and Sixth Avenues in New York. Relations of the inmates used to gather on the sidewalk to shout up to their incarcerated loved ones in a performance that was a tourist attraction in itself.

  Opposite my dressing room across the well is Judi Dench, one storey down are Alex Jennings and Penelope Wilton, with the next dressing room dark, the window slightly ajar and a thin skein of smoke ascending: Michael Gambon. I envy them all, since appearing regularly on the stage as most of them do this occasion is almost routine. I haven’t acted on stage for twenty years and am petrified. That the extract from The History Boys isn’t until ten minutes before the end makes it no easier. Still the dress rehearsal goes well, after which Nick Hytner rehearses an elaborate curtain call that grows out of Frances de la Tour’s final stage manager’s speech (‘Plays, plays, plays’) from The Habit of Art. I’m genuinely proud that it’s my words that end this remarkable show even though I wish I didn’t have to perform in it.

  8 November, Leeds. Walking along Wellington Street towards City Square I pass the offices of the probation service, now plastered with protest leaflets and posters from NAPO against the selling off of the service, protests that in my view are wholly justified. The notion that probation, which is intended to help and support those who have fallen foul of the law, should make a profit for shareholders seems beyond satire. As indeed is the proposal to take the East Coast Line out of what is virtually public ownership and reprivatise it for the likes of the expatriate Branson. I never used to bother about capitalism. It was just a word. Not now.

  27 November. We were supposed to be in New York this week but that falls through so instead we’re on a roundabout progress north that takes us this morning to Tong, a tiny village off the M62. It’s a treasure house of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tombs. Stanleys, Vernons, Pembrugges … some immaculate and unscribbled over, others with a patina of centuries of graffiti. Tong actually holds the secret of the English Reformation, as buried here is Sir Henry Vernon, guardian and treasurer to Arthur, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Henry VII, who was married to Katherine of Aragon. Vernon was in the best position to know if his young charge had actually slept with his Spanish bride, as the boy claimed and Katherine later denied. The boy, of course, died and his brother Henry VIII succeeded him, with Vernon himself dying in 1515, ten years or more before his knowledge would have been crucial, though, courtier that he was, he would probably have had the sense to keep it to himself, his secret now entombed in this left luggage office of the dead.

  28 November. Our appointment to see Debo is at eleven thirty. We’re early at Edensor so we go in the church and look at the huge seventeenth-century Cavendish monument – a very late (I should have thought) cadaver tomb, with the body also shown in its shroud and flanking the tomb an empty suit of antique armour and a mourning figure. The village lady cleaning the church remembers me coming for the flower festival, ‘Not that I could get a ticket, “You know who”’ having sold them all beforehand.

  ‘You know who’ is sitting with her feet up on a chair by the drawing-room fire, a blanket over her and staring into space. Helen, her PA, shows us in, chatting throughout, though Her Grace, as D. still manages to be, gives no sign of recognition or awareness of anyone being here. Yet, Helen insists, she will be noting our presence and maybe later on if she manages a few words will say something to indicate that, like a stroke victim, she is not unaware.

  No feeling that this is the home of, the room of an invalid – no sick-room smell, no old lady smell or anything different from the only time I was here before. An Atkinson Grimshaw on the wall and others of Bolton Abbey in the corner. Helen and Rupert fill in the s
pace with cheerful talk which in a way I hope D. isn’t noticing or being irritated by, though it’s hard not to include her in the conversation without condescending to her at the same time – which one would never have dared to do when she was eighty-five, say.

  Go to the silver-foil-lined downstairs loo with its memorials of Elvis and then we come away having talked, or just been there, for forty-five minutes or so.

  1 December. On a slow and stopping journey southwards we call at Barnack near Stamford to have another look at its Saxon tower. Few churches we’ve seen have been without a food bank, which depresses, but today’s visit is enlivened by two leafleting members of UKIP, whose campaign wagon is parked outside. They come in, inspect the church and quickly leave, and it’s only when they’ve gone we discover pinned to the church noticeboard a UKIP leaflet with another on the bookstall. Any party using church premises for its propaganda seems to me out of order, particularly since the gist of the leaflet is how unwelcome immigrants are, hardly appropriate in an institution that purports to welcome all comers, even Romanians. We leave and I put both leaflets in the receptacle for dead flowers.

  5 December. Debo D. apparently likes listening to my audiotapes, particularly The Uncommon Reader. Helen thinks she would like the Doctor Dolittle stories so I call Lucy at Chatto & Linnit to see if they are still available. It turns out they were marketed by BBC Audio-books which then metamorphosed into AudioGO which was then sold off by the BBC. The firm to which this (huge) audio library was sold has now gone into administration: what happens to the tapes no one as yet knows. So much for [the healthy discipline of] the market. Needless to say this doesn’t feature in the chancellor’s budget statement today.

  27 December. Home in Yorkshire after Christmas and Rupert brings out the fully dressed Christmas tree, exactly as it was put away (with-out being undressed) a year ago. Besides the lights one of its few ornaments is the battered celluloid fairy with a slit in her head for a glitterboard tiara, long since disappeared, and the bits of lampshade fringe Mam glued on as wings. She is my coeval, this fairy, bought I imagine when Gordon was born in 1931, three years after Mam and Dad were married. Now I look it’s her skirt that is lampshade fringe, her wings are actually silver paper, probably pre-dating foil and made out of old sweet wrappings – these two weeks her brief sojourn in the light, the rest of the year spent in hibernation.

  31 December. After the latest bulletin on the unconscious Michael Schumacher and the nation’s rejoicing that Penelope Keith has at last been welcomed into the ranks of the dames, the evening news gets round to saying that John Fortune has died. I knew he was ill but no one I know had been in touch with him – Eleanor B., John Bird, Andrew Nickolds – and postcards went unanswered. We turn the TV off and I sit trying to remember him as he was when we used to do sketches together for Ned Sherrin, how helpless with laughter we would become off screen and on because, even though the shows were televised live, part of the game – and TV was still a game then – was to try and make each other laugh. His rage I remember at people’s stupidity and at pretension and, like Peter Cook, his intolerance of boredom. Appropriately in view of his name he went through great vicissitudes of fortune: in the sixties when he was married to Susannah Waldo, he lived in a Scottish baronial castle at Blairgowrie, a precipitous drop outside the drawing-room window to a rushing torrent far below. The next I heard he was living in a poky basement flat in the Camden Road with Deborah Norton and together they then had a little house in Harlow. Then he married Emma Burge and lived in London and, I think, the New Forest. Like Peter C. he would ring up if any absurdity caught his eye, showbiz pretension always a delight. A lovely man.

  2014

  6 January. Though I’ve learned never entirely to believe in a film until it actually happens, it does seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death fifteen years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the script and am halfway through a third.

  The house where the story happened, 23 Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town, is currently lived in by the photographer Antony Crolla though many of my belongings are still there. This afternoon I go round to start the lengthy process of clearing out some of the books and papers so that it can be used for the filming.

  I first saw the house in 1968. Jonathan Miller lives in the same street and Rachel, his wife, saw the ‘For Sale’ sign go up. It belonged to an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room and also in its small garden. Slightly older than the other houses in the crescent, like many of them it had been a lodging house, so every room had its own gas meter and some had washbasins. I did most of the decorating myself, picking out the blurred and whitewashed frieze in the drawing room with a nail file, a job that these days would be done by steam cleaning, though then I was helped by some of the actors in Forty Years On, which was running in the West End. One of the actors was George Fenton, who is doing the music for the film, and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.

  8 January. Trying to pep myself up I walk over to the shops for some milk and coming out see the always welcome Don Warrington. I tell him how I’m trying to find reasons not to go to John Fortune’s funeral tomorrow – a predicament with which the deceased would be the first to sympathise. John was Stuart Burge’s son-in-law and his funeral is at the same church near Lymington in Hampshire. It’s a two-hour train journey and last time I remember it was followed by a bit of a wake in the village pub, which doesn’t commend it either. ‘Well,’ says Don, ‘at least you’re coming back.’ Which makes me laugh.

  ‘We’re all in the queue, dear.’

  15 January. The police officer who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met doesn’t seem to understand what is wrong with this. It’s just one word. Tact.

  25 January. House prices are on the rise and car production too – these are said to be ‘encouraging signs’. For whom?

  4 February. The betting shop on the corner of Chamberlain Street has gone. Not a great loss to me, who never went in there and wouldn’t have known how to place a bet if I had. But it’s to be replaced by yet another estate agent – another indicator of ‘the recovery’ though, I suppose, an estate agent is just a betting shop under a different name.

  20 February. The walls of the sitting room and the study in Gloucester Crescent are just as I decorated them nearly half a century ago. I have always been quite proud of my efforts, though aware over the years that the finish I achieved has often been thought eccentric.

  In 1969, having stripped the walls down to the plaster I stained the sitting room blue, using a polyurethane stain. The plaster was the original lime plaster put on when the house was built in 1840. Lime plaster has many advantages: it’s grainy and doesn’t soak up the stain like blotting paper as modern plaster tends to do (and which is often brown or pink). All the blemishes of the lime plaster showed through, including the notes to themselves made by the builders and their occasional graffiti. None of this I minded, but blue was not a good colour; it was too cold and for a while I thought I had ruined the room and would have to paper it, which was the last thing I wanted. Then, as an experiment I tried some yellow stain on a small patch and this turned the wall a vibrant green, too strong I’m sure for many people but for me ideal, so that’s how I did the whole room. The study next door I did differently using water-based stains and as the walls here were lime plaster too I painted them in a mixture of umber and orange, yellow and green. This I then washed down and sealed so that the room ended up far better than I could have imagined, taking on the warm shades of the walls of an Italian palazzo (I thought anyway). I am sure a competent scene painter would have been able to achieve the same
effects with much less trouble but I’m happy I did it myself. And in the intervening years the colour has not faded and will I trust continue to glow as long as any new owner suffers the original plaster to remain, which is not long probably as there are few houses on the street left in their original trim, today’s newcomers seldom moving in until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.

  28 February. Watch the last of the programmes about the celebrity architects – Foster, Grimshaw, Hopkins, Rogers and Farrell – Hopkins the most human but none of them betraying any kind of self-doubt and bankers apart a more arrogant and self-satisfied group one couldn’t wish to meet. Friends to power all of them but none, so far as the programme went, showing much interest in people’s ordinary living conditions (though there is a glimpse of a school by Foster) with all of them sublimely confident that what they are doing is for the good of humanity. Some of their work is rank bad – Farrell’s often cheap and tawdry, and while I like Grimshaw’s Lords (and his Waterloo as seen from above) his Camden Town Sainsbury’s is grim and never fails to lower the heart. I remember still when its plans went on show, including the demolition of the art deco ABC bakery on the site and the young Grimshaw’s architect smirking when I tackled him on this, ridiculing my concerns and saying it had all been decided. As I’m sure it had. With his Knightsbridge towers Rogers has long since forfeited any claim to moral authority but one would never guess it from the elevated notion he and the others have of themselves, a tone which the programme wholly endorsed.