by Alan Bennett
My exertions don’t leave me tired or out of breath as they are ideally supposed to, even though my bike has no gears and is quite heavy. I wear a helmet which is both a precaution and a disguise. The only trouble nowadays being that I keep thinking, ‘I am eighty.’ There is no forgetting that.
3 September. Michael Hughes and his companion from the Bodleian come to Gloucester Crescent to take away what I hope will be the final consignment of my stuff there – I say to them that if I find anything else I’ll just burn it. (They laugh nervously.) Of course there’s loads of stuff here too – all the notes – copies of what I’ve written for instance and dozens more files. It’s not affectation but I am truly ashamed to have written so much – or to have written so much besides what I’ve published.
In the afternoon comes Natalie, a nice woman from the film to look at photographs of me over the years if only to be convinced that I’ve been wearing pretty much the same outfit for forty years. Nick H. says this is a characteristic of Gloucester Crescent where Jonathan Miller, Michael Frayn and Colin Haycraft and me all went on dressing as we did as undergraduates. I branched out a bit in what Antony Crolla calls ‘your Robert Redford period’ – when my hair was longer – but otherwise it’s my prep-school master look.
8 September. The growing likelihood of independence for Scotland is also lowering, though I don’t altogether see why. I suppose I’ve always felt the Scots have been more sensible than we are – over Thatcher, education, politics and the law – and that with precious little common sense on offer in England we can ill afford to let them go.
10 September, Yorkshire. Up at six to catch the eight o’clock train to Leeds for Elaine Daniel’s funeral. Elaine was the manageress of Hertz in Leeds and so we’ve known her for twenty years and more – such a lovely funny daft woman who with her husband John, an ex-policeman, made a place for themselves in our lives. It’s at Rawdon Crematorium down a long windy drive set in trees above the valley and insofar as these places ever are, quite pleasant, and I’m unsurprised by the numbers there – all in black and very formal in a way they wouldn’t be in London. John on the other hand isn’t, deliberately one imagines, without a jacket and ushering in the coffin in his shirtsleeves and stopping en route to embrace and shake hands with friends. The chapel is packed, with people standing all the way round and the service robustly secular – God never getting a look-in. It’s taken by the undertaker, a Mr Crabtree, who’s not much of a speaker (and who didn’t know Elaine) but John’s brother makes up for it by reading out not the letters but phrases from the letters John has had, in which seemingly many of her friends remarked on Elaine’s delight in shopping, so ‘shopping’ keeps punctuating the list (and getting a laugh). Still, queuing up to speak to John I find myself filling up and when I come to hug him (this ex-policeman kissing everybody) I find myself unable to speak. To R. who’s behind, whom he kisses, he says, ‘Take care of him.’
As an occasion it was so Leeds – so serious which seems an odd thing to say about a funeral and heartfelt is I suppose what I mean. And so provincial – Elaine born and brought up in Leeds, like most of the people there, with many of them, I imagine, police or their connections – which isn’t always Leeds at its most admirable – but here decent and humane. Glad to leave it there and not go over to the do afterwards at Drighlington Golf Club (where Elaine would have been in her element).
But she was a grand woman, a real light.
We get a taxi which (this lovely day) takes us to Ilkley where we have delicious kedgeree at Betty’s before getting the 3.15 train back. This is another journey, though, ruined by a fellow passenger – a loud, complaining businessman, director of a printing firm, some of whose employees had managed to print some brochure upside down. ‘I am so disappointed in you, Damian.’ And still on the phone being disappointed when the train draws into King’s Cross.
14 September, Yorkshire. By the field next to the organic shop Growing with Grace yesterday morning we stop and talk to some sheep – or rather rams, a score or so of them grazing. I think they are Jacob sheep and very distinguished-looking, the breed that Elizabeth I resembles on her tomb in Westminster Abbey. They are friendlier – or bolder – than sheep normally are and half a dozen of them come over to the gate where R. talks to them and scratches their heads as they try and nip his jacket. Their wool is a brownish colour and seems almost braided. Their dicks are just two-inch-long pipes and almost invisible whereas their balls are huge and heavy, ready for the flocks that they will be tupping. They belong to Mr Nelson, one of the farmers in the village, who presumably rents them out and over near Austwick we pass another field of (less distinguished) rams.
Later that afternoon, having had tea at Gardenmakers, we blackberry on the road to Black Bank. My intrepid blackberrying (Dad would call it ‘blegging’) days are over and I can only pick those that are within reach, not daring to venture over the ditch where the choicer fruit still hangs – because it’s actually quite late to be picking, though there has as yet been no frost after which the devil is said to have pissed on them and they turn bitter.
Back in 1958 when I had been elected president of Exeter JCR I went off on my bike to Binsey (?) where I picked bagsful of blackberries, which were already (it must have been October) past their best. I stewed some of them on the gas ring in my room and with the rest I knocked on the door of the Lodgings and presented them to the rector’s wife, Mrs Wheare. She professed herself very grateful though I must have been marked down as mildly eccentric.
18 September. I come out onto the steps of Cecil Sharp House to find Tom Stoppard having a cigarette prior to going up to do auditions for his new play that Nick will be directing in the new year – the first time T. can remember doing auditions for eight years. He is as always very flattering and courteous, saying how he’s seen the book Six Poets in Agent Jones’s office and how good it looks. I say that much of that is down to Dinah and I think as we chat how immensely distinguished he is: there is no way, seeing him in the street, that he could not be a person of some consequence. It’s the hair, the eyes, the romantic look that he has – no one I know quite like him.
24 September. Open the paper this morning to find that Debo has died, ‘has eventually died’ I nearly wrote, since she was virtually turned to stone a few years ago and was only alive because of the loving care of her long-standing PA and friend Helen Marchant who kept her, smitten as she was, still looking as grand and handsome as ever with nothing of the invalid about her and – her silence apart – no hint of dementia. Nor did her home, the Old Vicarage at Edensor, the Old Vic as she called it, have anything of the sick room about it, with nothing to suggest anything was wrong. Everybody called her Debo but I was privileged not to do so, feeling when I first got to know her that our acquaintance was too brief for such familiarity so ending up calling her ‘Ms Debo’ while I was ‘Mr Alan’ or, later on, ‘Nibs’. The darling of the Spectator and a stalwart of the Countryside Alliance she was hardly up my street, but when she wrote asking if I would write a preface for one of her books I could not have been more flattered had she been Virginia Woolf herself and I was soon eating out of her hand. Once the request was made I knew there was no refusing, saying that the only woman I had come across with a will of comparable iron was Miss Shepherd. Thereafter Debo signed all her letters to me ‘D. Shepherd’. I favoured postcards, looking out for any of grubby back streets and sending them as ‘yet another unsunned corner of the Cavendish estates’.
She was tough, kind and above all fun. The last time I saw her when she was still herself was in September 2010 at a reception at the Garrick for the launch of her book Wait for Me!. She was ninety then but still sturdy and she could not be restrained from climbing onto a chair to address the party. And not a plain wooden chair either but an upholstered job on which she balanced precariously while she talked to a room which by that stage in her life she could no longer see.
By all accounts the funeral was as brisk and sensible as her life, with no
elegy and the hymns old favourites that made for a good sing. Not wanting to set sail on a sea of cellophane she banned all wrappings for the flowers.
Unattributed, I lifted a detail of her life for my play People. Years ago a neighbour in London, Josie Baird, who had worked at the British Museum copying their jewellery, was asked by Chatsworth to do the same for them. Debo told her to nose around the house to see if she could find anything worth reproducing. Josie opened a drawer and found some beads wrapped in old newspaper. ‘Oh yes,’ said Debo (airily I’m sure). ‘It’s the rosary of Henry VIII.’
26 September, north Norfolk. In the late afternoon R. finds Baconsthorpe Castle in the Shell Guide, which we manage to locate in a farmyard – the remains of a sixteenth-century fortified house with an intact gatehouse and two vast quadrangles and so looking not unlike Mount Grace (though minus the monastic cells). The house is moated, the moat leading off a mere on which float a dozen serene swans and in the evening light an enchanted place. A couple of other visitors stroll by and a village boy zooms through on his mountain bike but it’s a perfect spot, the more so for being unexpected – with the mere so inviting I want uncharacteristically to sit down on the bank and fish.
We drive round the coast road to Salthouse. High above the village and serving once as a lighthouse, the church was being refurbished the last time we were here. It’s now spick and span with the painted screen at the back of the nave defaced (literally) by iconoclasts but by the looks of it the paint so thin this can have taken very little doing. In the chancel is another painted board, differently defaced as it’s covered in graffiti of ships and names presumably done by the choirboys. But the most poignant relic is more recent and in the porch, a dirt-encrusted memorial, possibly an ex-gravestone to a soldier presumably from the Norfolk Regiment killed in the Korean War. It’s a rare feature in any church and seemingly as forgotten or as little regarded as that war itself. It’s more poignant for me because, had I not as a national serviceman managed to get on the Russian course, it’s a war I might have had to fight in myself like my fellow conscripts at Pontefract in 1952, some of whom were killed.
27 September. Increasingly deaf. In the friendly antique shop in Southwold a man with a camera round his neck wants to shake my hand. I ask if he is a photographer. ‘Only in an amateur way. Ramsgate mostly.’
Me: ‘Oh, I’ve never been to Ramsgate.’
‘Not Ramsgate,’ R. bellows from the other end of the shop. ‘Landscapes. Landscapes.’
And I remember David Lodge’s novel about his deafness which is full of such mishearings.
6 October. The first morning of filming for The Lady in the Van and I sit in what was once my study, the room now bare and cold, the walls plain plaster, just as it was when I first saw the house in 1968 though I’ve no memory of being shown it by the estate agent, which is an early shot in the film. Alex Jennings is playing me and looks remarkably like, with no hint of the outrageous blond there sometimes was in Cocktail Sticks when he played me on the stage.
Now Sam Anderson, ex-History Boy and a star of Doctor Who, does the opening shot as a Jehovah’s Witness:
‘Does Jesus Christ dwell in this house?’
Alex Jennings/A.B.: ‘No. Try the van.’
14 October. A footnote. Nearly thirty years ago, in 1986 I wrote a piece for the LRB about my uncle Clarence, my mother’s brother Clarence Eastwood Peel who was killed in the First War in 1917 at Passchendaele. Never having known where he was buried, I went to seek out the cemetery at Zillebeke, south-east of Ypres.
I wrote about his grave and the graves around, his companions in death who, as it were, are in the adjacent beds in this final barrack room, many of them from Leeds, and mentioned some of their names including a Private Mark Ruckledge. Today comes a letter from Helen Ruckledge, whose husband is this dead soldier’s great-grandson, who had happened to read the article in Writing Home. Until then, like our family, the Ruckledges had never known where their dead forebear was buried but now had sought him out just as we did.
17 October. On one occasion Miss Shepherd claimed to have seen a boa constrictor in Parkway ‘and it looked as if it was heading for the van’. At the time I dismissed serpent sightings as just another of Miss S.’s not infrequent visions … boa constrictors, Mr Khrushchev and (putting in regular appearances) the Virgin Mary; the dramatis personae of her visions always rich and varied. It turned out, though, that on this particular occasion Palmer’s, the old-fashioned pet shop on Parkway, had been broken into so a boa constrictor on the loose and gliding up the street wasn’t entirely out of the question, though whether the glint in its eye meant that it was heading for the van was more debatable.
This morning we film the sighting of the snake in one of the Gloucester Crescent gardens. And a proper snake it is, too, a real boa constrictor, all of nine foot long and answering to the name of Ayesha, who has made the journey from Chipping Norton together with her slightly smaller friend and companion Clementine, both in the care of their handler.
I have had unfortunate experiences with animal handlers as indeed has Maggie Smith, who once had to vault over a stampeding porker during the shooting of A Private Function. Today’s handler, though, seems sensible and (unlike the pig handler) unopinionated and since Ayesha doesn’t have anything taxing to do in the way of acting, confines himself to making her and Clementine comfortable on a bed of hot-water bottles.
25 October. At noon comes Paul Hoggart to record some impressions of his father, Richard, whose memorial meeting is at Goldsmiths next week. He talks about his and his brother’s childhood in the shadow of The Uses of Literacy and how anyone meeting them would generally kick off by remembering what an impression the book had made on them, reminding me that on first meeting Simon Hoggart I had done just that. I first read The Uses of Literacy (1957) in New York in 1963, not out of any sociological interest but from homesickness. Marooned on Broadway with Beyond the Fringe, for me the book was a taste of Yorkshire and more particularly of Leeds. It wasn’t the Leeds I knew. We lived in Armley, which had some slums but was otherwise boring and comparatively genteel. Hoggart’s Leeds was Hunslet, poorer, slummier and an altogether more straitened environment, with Hoggart brought up by his grandmother and various aunties – in that respect not dissimilar to the upbringing of Karl Miller. Forget P. G. Wodehouse, for a working-class boy aunties can be no bad thing. Before I read The Uses of Literacy had I had any thoughts of writing, my own childhood – safe, dull and in a loving family – was enough to discourage me. My life, it seemed to me, was not conducive to literature, but it was reading Hoggart’s close account of his growing up in Hunslet that changed my mind.
Many years later Hoggart wrote asking to interview me for a TV series he was doing. To my lasting regret I turned him down, thinking as I often do with interviews, that I would at last be found out. So I wrote back saying how much his work meant to me, but we never met, though he would often send me copies of his books. Paul Hoggart tells me that late in life his father felt that he was a failure and that he ought to have been a novelist. Sad though this is, I can see why, and how a book as romantic as The Uses of Literacy could lead on to literature, as reading it did with me. It has some wonderful Hardyesque moments, Hoggart at one point standing on the edge of Holbeck Moor (the moors of Leeds, it should be said, as much cinder patches as haunts of heather) and looking across seeing the great bulk of his school, Cockburn High School, lit up in the dusk and freighted with all those hopeful souls like himself, passengers on a liner waiting to sail away to a better future. I quoted to Paul Hoggart something I had come across the day before in one of D. J. Enright’s commonplace books, Injury Time. ‘Richard Hoggart has written of the “scholarship boys” of his and my generation: “Like homing pigeons, to a loft we knew only from hearsay, we headed for the humanities and, above all, for literature.”’ I am happy to have been one of those pigeons.
27 October. Late going round to the unit this morning to find them about to film the scene when ma
nure was being delivered to No. 23 whereupon Miss S. came hurrying over to complain about the stench and to ask me to put a notice up to tell passers-by that the smell was from the manure not her.
Having done one take we are about to go again when it occurs to me that the manure, if fresh, would probably be steaming, as I seem to recall it doing at the time. While this is generally agreed, no one can think of a way of making the (rather straw-orientated) manure we are using steam convincingly. Dry ice won’t do it and kettles of hot water prove too laborious. So in the end we go with it unsteaming, the net result of my intervention being that whereas previously everybody was happy with the shot now thanks to me it doesn’t seem quite satisfactory.
13 November. One of the small pleasures of living in Gloucester Crescent/NW1 and one which went unmentioned in the (ever more lavish) brochures put out by the (ever more present) estate agents was waking around six in the morning to the sound of distant horses. Still in those days billeted in St John’s Wood the King’s Troop regularly exercised in Regent’s Park, which would occasionally bring them along Oval Road and down the Crescent. The ancient sound of horsemen carried in the early morning air so one would hear the troop long before they cantered into view, twenty or thirty horses, with each khaki-clad soldier leading another riderless mount. The mood of this troop was often quite festive and carefree, in spring a rider plucking down a gout of cherry blossom and putting it in his hat, and in winter there would be some sly snowballing. I always got up to watch them go by and on occasion Miss Shepherd would observe her own stand-to, a young soldier once giving her a mock salute. In summer I fancy they were in shirtsleeve order, but even when they were more formally dressed it was a relaxed performance, which in winter was made more romantic as the riders materialised out of the gloom, preceded by a lone horseman with a lantern, another outrider with a lamp bringing up the rear. Somewhere in London I imagine this spectacle still goes on but St John’s Wood Barracks has gone and it’s Camden Town’s loss – and since the Guards can’t trek over from Hyde Park, the film’s loss too.