by Alan Bennett
28 November. We travel regularly on the East Coast Line. It’s hugely expensive, as what line isn’t, but that apart it’s a very good service – generally punctual, the staff, some of whom we’ve got to know, cheerful and obliging and sometimes engagingly silly, making train travel as pleasant as it can be these days. For the last five years the line has virtually been nationalised with its profits going to the public purse and there is no economic reason why this state of affairs should not continue. But just as in the last months of his government John Major made haste to privatise (disastrously) the railways so this contemptible administration has sold off the line yet again, this time to Stagecoach and Virgin. There is no way this can be presented as being in the public interest: it’s putting yet more money in private pockets already well lined from previous deals. It’s ideology masquerading as pragmatism. I have always thought Branson a bit of a pillock and presumably (if they’re as gay-unfriendly as they ever were) Stagecoach isn’t much better. The prudes and the pillock. I look forward to the logo.
6 December. The nastification of England – pass on a short ride this afternoon umpteen houses e.g. at Sawley and beyond Wigglesworth that have been ‘improved’ or converted – all badly – bad windows, crude pointing, poor stonework – all nastified.
16 December. I’ve never much wanted a dog, feeling life is quite complicated enough. Rupert craves one, and other people’s dogs always like him as they seldom do me. Today I’m coming along Regent’s Park Road past the delicatessen when a woman stops me, wondering if I would mind holding her dog while she goes in and gets some pasta. It’s a dachshund and harmless-looking, so I stand there, holding the lead of this (to me) entirely unsuitable dog as people go by, and whether they’re being friendly to me or to the dog or to the pair of us together, stop and chat as I suppose dog owners do. Except I have to explain it’s not my dog at all and should we ever get a dog it certainly wouldn’t be a dachshund. Though actually the dog is sweet and affectionate, licking my hand and nuzzling me much in the way Hockney’s famous Stanley does (or did). In a short story the owner would never come back, leaving me and the dog to make a life together, but here she is, having got her pasta, and duly grateful. ‘I knew I could rely on you because you’re from the North.’ R., of course, is delighted by this incident, seeing it as a possible chink in my armour. I think not.
2015
7 January. Catch the last half hour of the film of The History Boys on Channel 4, presumably put on as a pendant to Mark Lawson’s hour-long interview with Frances de la Tour that follows. Coming on it unexpectedly I’m surprised by its delicacy and how little of it is overdone which, considering when we made the film the cast had been doing the play for two and a half years, is no small achievement. In the interview afterwards Frankie (in the course of praising the film) says maybe it isn’t as good as the play. Well, I think it is, the only casualty (which wasn’t in the play) Penelope Wilton’s beautiful cameo as the art mistress. Frankie remembers asking me why my dialogue isn’t quite the way people speak. ‘It’s known as style,’ I’m supposed to have (rather pompously) replied, though I’ve no recollection of it … and I’m not sure it is anyway. What I do remember is Russell Tovey in the wings murmuring to Ms de la Tour, ‘Frankie, if I weren’t gay would you shag me?’ She looked him up and down before saying dubiously, ‘I might.’
Jane Bown who died just before Christmas was a superb photographer and a nice, unassuming woman. I think, though, I was one of her failures, her pictures of me unremarkable and unrevealing to the extent that I don’t think I even kept them. They were taken on the step outside Gloucester Crescent, her approach, presumably well tried, being a pretence of incompetence. It wasn’t quite ‘I don’t really understand cameras’ but I remember her saying at one point, as she was shooting both in black and white and colour, ‘I’m never sure how to do colour.’ This may have irritated me slightly, as I felt her disingenuous approach insulting to my intelligence. So maybe a hint of impatience showed in my face.
10 January. After supper at the NPG restaurant we slip next door to the National Gallery, still after all these years a great luxury to be able to go in after hours. Walking through the galleries with the lights springing on as one passes through each door it’s always a temptation to turn aside and look at old favourites but we press on to the basement of the Sainsbury Wing and the Late Rembrandt show. Oddly arranged in that there are half a dozen of the great self-portraits at the start, which one somehow feels should be the climax of the show, but better for me as by the time we do get round this quite substantial exhibition I’m exhausted. As always with Rembrandt feel almost arraigned by the self-portraits and put on the spot. ‘And?’ he seems to be saying, ‘So?’ The self-disgust is there and the sadness but in a very contemporary way he’s a celebrity, resenting being looked at while at the same time (and like any other celebrity) having put himself in the way of it in the first place. Bridget goes round pretty much at my pace, Rupert as always slower and taking more in … noting the tears brimming in Lucrezia’s eye, for instance and how she has had to half slip herself out of her heavily brocaded dress the more easily to stab herself. He marvels at the oath of the Batavii which (it not having much colour) doesn’t touch me in the same way though I wish I had some of the smaller dry-points … Christ preaching for instance … if only to examine the details … a child playing on the floor beneath Christ’s feet, some of his hearers transfixed, others just bored … though apart from marvelling at Rembrandt’s technical skill my appreciation doesn’t get much beyond the ‘people were the same then as they are now’ level. I can see how touching the Jewish bride is, while always thinking it looks awkwardly posed (‘Look, I’m permitted to touch her breast’) and the moist sadness of Bathsheba is wonderful, (though R. of course notices as I don’t the absurd hat the serving woman is wearing). One of the saints, Bartholomew in the penultimate room has always looked to me like Arnold Bennett (the author, not my cousin the policeman) but somehow I miss one of my favourites, the Kenwood self-portrait against its two circles, which is there but I pass it by. I also miss because it is not there at all The Return of the Prodigal Son from the Hermitage, which I have always wanted to see and about which I once wrote the rough outline of a script.
Shattered before the end and sometimes lying full length on one of the (relatively few) benches to ease my aching legs. The only other visitors we see are a couple of middle-aged ladies and a senior figure with four young people (which exactly describes them) all wearing Clockwork Orange-type bowler hats and seeming, we all agree afterwards, insufficiently awed by the privilege being accorded them. Which we decidedly are not, twenty years after it was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.
15 January. I’m reading the last volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters, Building, which is less interesting and less amusing than the earlier volumes as so much of it is to do with what his life became … fundraising, administration and setting up Wolfson. Two good quotes, though, one from Wodehouse and one (which I think I knew) from Pascal.
‘As P. G. Wodehouse said (a quotation much loved by our friend Maurice Bowra, who brought it into many public utterances): “The trouble about you, old boy, is that you haven’t a soul and it’s the soul that delivers the goods.”’
And Pascal: ‘All men’s unhappiness comes from not knowing how to remain peacefully in a room.’
28 January. Thoughts about Wolf Hall (TV 28 January):
Hilary Mantel, Niall Ferguson, Alan Taylor: History is a playground. The facts are Lego. Make of them what you will.
It’s a sentiment I would happily have put into the mouth of Irwin in The History Boys.
15 February. Good reviews of Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or anally raped, or has his or her feet eaten off by rats, the
pain of this (I nearly wrote ‘the discomfort’) must transcend anything else that happens on the stage. A character who has lost a limb cannot do other than nurse the wound … no other discussion is possible. Not to acknowledge this makes the play, however brutal and seemingly realistic, a romantic confection. If there is pain there must be suffering. (But, it occurs to me, Gloucester in Lear?) Other topics concerning me at the moment are Beckett’s sanitisation of old age which, knowing so little of Beckett, I may have hopelessly wrong. But Beckett’s old age is dry, musty, desiccated. Do Beckett’s characters even smell their fingers? Who pisses? How does the woman in Happy Days shit?
When we went to see the Late Rembrandt the other week, I noticed that in none of the rooms at the National Gallery was there the usual chair for the warder. This was of personal concern to me who needs to keep sitting down and, with no warders on duty, I’ll generally sit on their chairs. An article by Polly Toynbee in this morning’s Guardian explains why. Presumably as part of the sponsorship deal for the exhibition the wardering of the exhibition was outsourced so the first casualty was the warders’ chairs … and the warders’ comfort. (I’ve a feeling that the warders in the Met in New York don’t get to sit down either.) This outsourcing is presumably a prelude to outsourcing the wardering altogether with it being done by Serco or some similar organisation. Toynbee says the warders are not surprisingly opposed to this development and that the trustees are too, as I hope when I was a trustee I would have been. I’m mildly surprised that outsourcing still persists as these days it’s so generally discredited.
26 February. In the afternoon come Martha Kearney and Julia Ross to record the Best of British piece for The World at One. No fuss about it, though it’s not what they’re expecting. Martha brings a jar of her own honey saying that bees are the best thing in her life, except that she’s been stung so often she now has an allergy. A propos the bee skeps built into the walls in our village she says that bees don’t mind the cold; it’s damp they don’t like (though in our village they’ll get both).
We record the piece round the kitchen table and it’s all done within half an hour. The Best of British.
I thought, why not Swaledale or medieval churches or even, with all its shortcomings, the National Trust. But what I think we are best at in England … I do not say Britain … what I think we are best at, better than all the rest, is hypocrisy.
Take London. We extol its beauty and its dignity while at the same time we are happy to sell it off to the highest bidder … or the highest builder.
We glory in Shakespeare yet we close our public libraries.
A substantial minority of our children receive a better education than the rest because of the social situation of the parents. Then we wonder why things at the top do not change or society improve. But we know why. It’s because we are hypocrites.
Our policemen are wonderful provided you’re white and middle-class and don’t take to the streets. And dying in custody is what happens in South America. It doesn’t happen here.
And it gets into the language. We think irony very English and are rather proud of it but in literary terms it’s how we have it both ways, a refined hypocrisy. And in language these days words which start off as good and meaningful … terms like environment and energy-saving … rapidly lose any credence because converted into political or PR slogans, ending up the clichéd stuff of an estate agent’s brochure … a manual for hypocrisy.
A memorable phrase in Hamlet, one of the few that hasn’t been picked up as a quotation or a title for something else, is when Claudius is arranging for Hamlet to be arrested and executed when he gets to our shores. And in his letter he says, ‘Do it, England.’ And we say we do it or we’re going to do it. But we don’t. Scotland does it. And Wales. But not England. In England what we do best is lip service.
And before you stampede for the Basildon Bond or rather skitter for the Twitter I would say that I don’t exempt myself from these strictures. How should I? I am English. I am a hypocrite.
10 March. Nationwide celebrations are apparently going on in connection with Barry Cryer’s upcoming eightieth birthday. This was in connection with the Aardman Slapstick Comedy Legend Award:
I have probably known Barry, if only by sight, as long as anyone here since both of us used to do our homework in Leeds Reference Library when we were schoolboys. Everybody, I’m sure, will say what fun he is which of course I endorse but he’s also a great comforter. If one has had a bad notice or is being pilloried in the papers Barry is the first person to ring up with the most comfortable words in the language, namely ‘Fuck ’em.’
There’ll be a joke to follow, generally parrot-based but it’s the ‘Fuck ’em’ that counts.
He’s also full of surprises. I’m not authorised to bring greetings from beyond the grave but were he still with us someone who would surely stand up to be counted among Barry’s friends and admirers would be that most austere and reticent of actors, Paul Scofield. It’s an unlikely pairing but they were together in the fifties in the musical Expresso Bongo.
12 March. This last week I finish reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen and The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, both books about wildernesses, Stewart’s in Afghanistan, Cowen’s in almost comical contrast in and around Harrogate.
As he tells the story Stewart seems in regular peril of his life, Cowen less so as he just makes expeditions from his suburban home into the scrub and undergrowth that surrounds Bilton near Knaresborough. In a spell of unemployment and while his wife is pregnant Cowen goes native, lying out in the marginal areas around the town taking in the vegetation and the wildlife, some of it surprisingly copious … a large number of hares, for instance, owls, which he tracks, and roe deer which almost track him. It chronicles the inroads made by well-meaning planners and interest groups as they tidy up what they see as mess, laying a cycle path along an old railway line and with the threat of a new housing estate always looming. It ends on a positive note with the awkward birth of Cowen’s baby vividly and movingly described, its eventual survival almost bringing tears to the eyes. Cowen writes very well and with none of the stylistic elaboration of some of the other nature writers.
It’s hard to say why Stewart’s book is so enthralling. It’s partly the physical deprivation he puts himself through, cold most of the time and often soaking wet, regularly soiling his clothes with no mention of when he manages to wash them. Trudging across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul it’s rare he gets a square meal, his only regular companion a run-down mastiff that he adopts which, far from making life easier, requires more attention than a small child. Struck by his toughness and determination one wonders how he can stand his present-day Tory colleagues in the House of Commons. Both are cracking books so that having finished them I now feel deprived.
26 March. To Oxford where Nick Hytner and I are to speak at the Oxford Literary Festival. Rupert and I stay at the Old Parsonage where I have been staying now for thirty years, though it has recently been done up. It’s showers now not baths and one can no longer make a cup of tea in the room. When I ask why, I’m told these are ‘improvements’. Our talk is in the Sheldonian before which we have tea with Bodley’s librarian, Richard Ovenden, who asks Nick (as I never have) what his plans are when he leaves the National tomorrow. This is the first I hear of the theatre he plans for Southwark. The audience in the Sheldonian is pretty star-studded, with Jessye Norman on the front row statuesque in a magnificent gown and scarlet turban. We get off to a good start by saying that we are undoubtedly destined for theatrical immortality if only because we were both stepping stones in the rise and rise of James Corden.
1 April. Almost out of piety and a respect for tradition I filch a couple of branches from the base of a balsam poplar on the north side of Regent’s Park. The buds are hardly open and thus are briefly heavily scented. Now in a glass on the sitting-room mantelpiece they bring a flavour to the room as they have done every spring for the last forty years.
4 April, Easter
Saturday, Yorkshire. With a bad ankle I edge my way carefully down the stairs and delicately round the garden. I still have the absurd notion that, as with any other ailment, age and infirmity will run its course and I will recover from it. That there is no recovery … or only one … doesn’t always occur. Still the reopening of the village shop as a community enterprise means that I (and my stick) can once again trudge down there for the paper (as I do in London with much less effort on my bike).
12 April. Looking for a book to read while I’m in Paris I pick up The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks, an account of the life and upbringing of a Lakeland shepherd. Sheep have never been of much interest to me, the only one to make an impression an affectionate and rather dog-like ram we encountered years ago at Thornton Priory in north Lincolnshire which must once have been a pet. Like Rory Stewart’s book it’s the hardship and deprivation of Rebanks’s life that straight away enthrals. His initial absence of schooling (and an unattractive dislike of teachers) is coupled with a lack of interest in anything except the life of the farm and the love of working there. In the course of the book however (and almost without explanation) Rebanks starts to read and educate himself and (again without explanation) gets to Oxford and in due course (and not I think in the book) is awarded a First while remaining an almost emblematic hill farmer and, incidentally, a UNESCO representative. But hardship and husbandry lace themselves through his life even though I imagine he must now be a much sought-after author. The whole thesis of the book celebrates or at least recognises the day-to-day labours of farmers such as Rebanks and their determination to maintain a way of life, though I imagine in his case that will these days be harder to do. I’ve only read one review of the book that’s at all dubious though this shepherd’s life can’t be quite as straightforward as it seems.