Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  The sheep round us have always seemed to me an unprepossessing lot, lank, shabby and not to be spruced up even for a show. What breed they are I’ve no idea though they’re still brought down through the village to be sheared when the rams, haughty and disdainful, achieve a brief, even a Roman dignity. We have a narrow strip of front garden and at the first sound of the approaching flock my father used to rush out flapping his apron and shouting his head off to protect his precious plants.

  13 April. Rereading Portnoy’s Complaint, I’m not surprised at Dad’s reaction when he found it in my bookcase at Wood Lane fifty years ago. In some misguided missionary zeal that makes me cringe even to remember I may actually have recommended it. Because if it shocked him then it shocks me now, though I don’t imagine he read more than a few pages before putting it back and never mentioning it again. He’d probably have been hoping it was going to be more along the lines of Nancy Mitford who, slightly to my surprise, he found very funny. Fifty years later Portnoy still makes me laugh and to anyone shy or (an unlikely thought) thinking themselves wicked for wanking, the book is an emancipation, though without being in the least bit erotic. The style is still a delight.

  30 April. A red kite low over suburban Bramhope, its forked tail plain against the sky. Two beats of its wings and it’s away, the whole of Wharfedale spread out below. My unshared and unshareable despair at the likely outcome of the election.

  5 May. In the evening to the Royal Free to see Owen, Rupert’s brother, and Lucy and Freddy their new baby, born five weeks prematurely while we were in Paris and so now just ten days old. My inclination is simply to gaze, feeling like one of the Magi before this tiny, tiny thing who sleeps throughout while occasionally clenching his delicate fists and stretching. Awe is I suppose what I feel, and a huge clumsiness, though Rupert who at twelve had to nurse Owen when he was born is happy to hold Freddy throughout. There’s a vast view of Parliament Hill from the window but one scarcely glances at it, this little scrap of humanity filling the room. The joy of Owen and Lucy at this safe deliverance is something to see. I don’t think I’ve ever known a baby as newly born … and as safely born as this. It doesn’t make me feel old, just huge. Rupert in raptures.

  8 May. A feeling of bereavement in the streets. I shop for supper and unprompted a grey-haired woman in the fish shop bursts out, ‘It means I shall have a Tory government for the rest of my life.’

  In the library they say, ‘Good morning … though we’ve just been trying to think what’s good about it.’

  I wanted a Labour government so that I could stop thinking about politics, knowing that the nation’s affairs were in the hands of a party which, even if often foolish, was at least well-intentioned. Now we have another decade of the self-interested and the self-seeking, ready to sell off what’s left of our liberal institutions and loot the rest to their own advantage. It’s not a government of the nation but a government of half the nation, a true legacy of Mrs Thatcher. Work is the only escape, which fortunately moves along a little.

  9 May. My birthday. A nice woman in a leopardskin coat who always speaks wishes me a happy birthday. I say that I wish it was.

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘Last Thursday. The election.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about that. They’re all the same.’

  At which point (we are in Shepherd’s grocers) I hear myself as very rarely shouting at the top of my voice. ‘No, they are not all the same. This lot are self-seeking liars, the cabinet included, and we’re landed with them for another five years.’ She tries to calm me down but I tell her not to bother, with other customers peeping round the shelves to see who is making all this din.

  She is waiting outside the shop with a cake she has bought me for my birthday and I kind of apologise. But as I walk back home I wonder how long it will be before this crew turn their attention to the BBC.

  13 May. Talk to the (always cheering) Archie Powell. His four-year-old son Wilfred is learning chess and was recently taken to a Church of England confirmation service where the bishop officiating was Richard Charteris. Having ascertained that Charteris was a bishop Wilfred whispered, ‘Does that mean he can only move diagonally?’ Archie is ‘easy’ about religion but wife Jane, like Rupert, is fiercely atheist.

  20 May, Yorkshire. Around seven R. shouts upstairs, ‘Look out on the lawn. Now.’ I look out of the bedroom window and there is something on the grass but I don’t at first even recognise it as a bird. Then it becomes plain it’s a hawk which has brought down an unspecifiable bird which is still feebly fluttering as the hawk rips into it. What is strange is that the hawk, possibly in order to give it purchase for its pecking, is spreading its wings over its prey and as it were cloaking it from view though never letting up from tearing strips off the now dead bird. Eventually R. opens the back door and the hawk – a white flash on its breast – flies off with (R. thinks) a blackbird in pursuit. All that it leaves on the grass is a smear and some feathers, everything else … beak, claws, legs … has been eaten. It’s something neither of us has ever seen before, leaving us untalkative and slightly shocked.

  23 May, Yorkshire. A glorious morning and for the first time in ten days, warm so that I can do my favourite thing, namely sit out in the rocking chair with my old straw hat on reading the paper and having my breakfast. This is after a now routine visit to the reopened village shop, a wholly delightful experience as it’s busy, everybody working there a volunteer and far more of a social centre than it’s been in twenty years. The pleasure begins at the (double) door itself, which was found abandoned in the attic and now reinstated and which as one pushes through feels like coming into a saloon in a western.

  25 May. A woman in front of me in the greengrocer’s:

  ‘I’ll be ninety tomorrow. It’s disgusting.’

  27 May. Go through my papers looking for anything I may have overlooked about Miss Shepherd prior to the filming of The Lady in the Van. I find some notes on Miss S.’s costume in the 1980s plus a few of her odder remarks.

  As I occasionally did I must have complained about the smell:

  Miss S.: Well there are mice, I know that and they make for a cheesy smell, possibly.

  Miss S. today May 10 ’76

  (the smell)

  It fair knocks you down

  Fawn Charlie Brown pitcher’s hat

  or a golfing hat

  maroon

  turquoise

  The mouse –

  She’s made some little holes and one day a worm came in. Out of the rain, I think. Then it went out again.

  This cough has thrown me back – I wouldn’t give it to a dog.

  Steps are the problem.

  The devil gets people to say things and they don’t know they say them.

  There’s not one in a thousand would do what you’ve done. (Not said by Miss Shepherd!)

  Rabies is in the news:

  Miss S. gets a severe pain in the back.

  ‘I wonder if it could be rabies.’

  I have builders in and knowing they must think I’m crazy to accommodate her feel I must complain about the stench of urine.

  Miss S.: Well what can you expect when they rain bricks down on me all day.

  *

  To Hay-on-Wye with Nick Hytner and Dinah Wood, a much longer ride in time terms than the one to Leeds that I’m used to though it’s much nearer. The set-up, a busy tented enclosure is like a county show with literature standing in for husbandry and authors being led about like pedigree cattle. Nick and I are interviewed by Francine Stock with a couple of clips from the film of The Lady in the Van which go down well. This is followed by Q&A with these days the questions having to be repeated for my benefit as, hearing aid or no hearing aid I still can’t hear. I finish off with a paragraph I’ve written out in advance:

  The story told by this film took place forty and more years ago and Miss Shepherd is long since dead. She was difficult and eccentric but above all she was poor and, these days particu
larly the poor don’t get much of a look-in, poverty as much a moral failing today as it was under the Tudors. If the film has a point it’s about fairness and tolerance and, however grudgingly, helping the less fortunate who are not well thought of these days and now likely to be even less so.

  Tory heartland though this is, it produces continued applause and then I am given a medal, in accepting which I manage to weave in one of my favourite anecdotes told, I think, originally by Nigel Nicolson. He was at a launch of his big coffee-table book, Great Houses of Britain when he saw across the room a woman he thought he recognised and advanced towards her.

  ‘Dear lady, may I congratulate you on having what is surely the most beautiful house in Britain.’

  ‘Really? 47A Lansdowne Road?’

  It’s the ‘A’ that always makes me laugh.

  28 May. Finish Adam Nicolson’s book on Homer, The Mighty Dead, which is occasionally over-rich but very enjoyable. It ends as the Odyssey ends with Odysseus’s return to Ithaca and the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors and the hanging of her maids, scenes of such horror they alienate whatever sympathy one might have for the returning wanderer. Which is not much in my case as he seems a colossal bore … and likely to be more so as time goes on. If he and Penelope had an old age has anyone written about it? It would be like growing old alongside Field Marshal Montgomery.

  Otherwise life at the moment is what my mother would have called ‘a bit of a fullock’, fullock meaning a hurry or a rush with fullocky its adjective. One thing piled on another.

  29 May. Shortly after the East Coast franchise has been sold off to a tie-up between Virgin and Stagecoach I am sitting on Leeds Station waiting for Rupert when a notice is flashed up on the Sky screen:

  ‘Hello Leeds. Meet Virgin Trains. We’ve just arrived and we can’t wait to get to know you.’

  And take you for every penny we can.

  The last sentence mine.

  27 June. What is particular to this time is that now we all have computers so we all have something to hide. Whereas once upon a time innocent boys kept their girlie mags under the mattress or on top of the wardrobe, now they – and their fathers and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts – have their stash or its location on their computers. So if disgrace should come the computer will compound it as it will be the first to be taken into custody. Whether the material has been downloaded or not the computer will reveal what pornography has been looked at and what sort and how often. We are all self-shamed.

  4 July, Yorkshire. It’s six in the evening and I’m sitting at the end of the garden in the warm sunshine and answering some of the letters I brought up with me yesterday, including one from Richard Hope, now in his last two weeks as Hector in a tour of The History Boys. He tells me that Sid Sagar, who plays Akhtar, has just got a First at Bristol, the last two terms of which must have overlapped with his being in the play. I write him a card of congratulations, hoping – though not saying – that the period after his graduation won’t be as difficult as it often is … and as it certainly was with me.

  7 July. Run into Philip and Kersti French in M&S with Philip bent tight over his trolley and using it as a walker. I ask him how he is.

  ‘Dreadful.’

  ‘Anything specific?’

  ‘Knees. Legs. Lungs. Kidneys … shall I go on?’ The recital so fluent it’s partly a joke but looking at him it’s hard not to believe every word. I come out not, I’m sure, having cheered them up, thankful that I can still at least mount my bike and cycle away. Sixty years since I first met him when he was a self-assured ex-paratrooper of an undergraduate at my college, his stutter used to emphasise his machine-gun wit … and already knowing everything there was to be known about films and quite definitely a man of the world.

  18 July, Yorkshire. Not having a mortgage or being otherwise in hock to the bank I am not particularly perturbed when the governor of the Bank of England predicts a likely rise in the interest rate. What does bother me is that for no obvious reason that I’ve seen mentioned Mr Carney should have made his announcement in Lincoln Cathedral. Why there? And why in a cathedral at all? Are cathedrals for hire nowadays whatever the occasion? How long before one of Mr Osborne’s rallying calls to the nation is embedded in Sung Eucharist?

  The heron has been fishing in the beck every morning this weekend. I’ve never actually seen it catch anything or even to seemingly take much interest in what’s going on in the water and it’s so still that though quite a few walkers go across the packhorse bridge very few of them pick it out. An untidy Dickensian-looking bird, like a half-folded grey umbrella, if disturbed it unhurriedly takes off sailing languidly upstream towards the waterfall, as it flies never quite knowing what to do with its legs.

  25 July. ‘Your honesty will die.’ This is a woman at the annual village street market when she sees Rupert buying an honesty plant. It will, of course which Rupert knows but he also knows that the dead flowers will then turn into translucent seed pods which are its attraction. As it is (and because she somehow comes up from below) she seems like the voice of doom and the phrase becomes a family joke (if the two of us constitute a family).

  3 August (the day of Dad’s death forty-one years ago). To Gosford Street behind the BBC to record Sue MacGregor’s programme The Reunion about the writing and production of the two Talking Heads series in 1987 and 1998. The actors taking part are Penelope Wilton, Patricia Routledge and Stephanie Cole with Tristram Powell representing the direction. Stephanie, who has come up from Bath, is actually performing in Talking Heads at the Theatre Royal, though not Soldiering On which she did in the first series but A Cream Cracker Under the Settee in which Thora Hird had such a success. Sue MacGregor is a gentle, almost loving guide and commentator, teasing out anecdotes and generally getting some good stuff while making sure everybody gets a fair whack. There’s a bit too much of the wondrousness of Alan Bennett’s writing so that I almost feel it would have been easier had I not been present (and I ring this morning, 4 August, to tell the editor not to hesitate to cut some of the compliments) but though I’d been nervous about it (as had the others) I think it will make a good programme.

  The best anecdote to come out of the first series was told me by Tony Cash, who heard A Lady of Letters translated on French radio. In the original version Miss Ruddock, talking about her dubious neighbours on whom she spies remarks, ‘Couple opposite having their tea. No cloth on. Milk bottle stood there waiting.’ This has been translated, ‘Couple opposite having their tea. No clothes on. Milk bottle stood there waiting.’ And it’s the milk bottle that intrigues.

  5 August. Watch guiltily over (and well beyond) my lunch an outstanding programme (c.2000) by David Attenborough in which by tracing the origins of a wooden figure he picked up in a New York auction house he unfolds the whole history and culture of Easter Island. Aside from it being such an instructive programme he also transmits some of the obsession and enthusiasm of the dedicated collector so that one ends up even envying him his little wooden figure.

  6 August. Dinah Wood sends me a postcard à propos these diaries. The postcard is of a model of a plumber done by her brother Wilfrid and it’s a cheerful figure all tooled up and girded with a belt of a plumber’s typical accoutrements so dense and various that one doesn’t immediately spot hanging among the ratchets, wrenches and spanners another plumber’s tool, namely his dick. Nothing is done to draw attention to this personal hosepipe which to begin with I don’t even notice and it’s this (and the cheeriness of the plumber) that makes it very funny.

  8 August. Sixty-three years since I went into the army when my biggest fear was having to take my clothes off whether for shower, medical examinations or whatever. In the event I managed never to have to go naked at any time during my National Service or indeed university that followed it. At Coulsdon where I was stationed to begin with I used to go for a shower (once a week) on a Saturday evening when the camp (and the showers) were empty. This was a dread that dogged me half my life.

/>   11 August. A strike of warding staff at the National Gallery where it is planned to outsource the warding to Securitas, a firm supposedly with a wealth of experience in the field. No matter that the field also includes airports, car parks and whatever. I’ve seen no protests from the trustees or anyone making the point that the warders at the NG are a resource worth conserving, so various, interesting and eccentric they are that they don’t just keep an eye on the visitors and the paintings but are themselves part of the NG’s ecology. I don’t know how the strike can succeed but I hope that it does. Not a good trustee myself I hope I would have made more of a public fuss than any that I’ve seen.

  12 August. I’m not a member of the Labour Party and so can’t vote. If I could, though, I’d vote for Jeremy Corbyn if only out of hope that the better part of salvation lies not in electoral calculation but in the aspirations of the people.

  14 August. Bridget is cleaning the marble-topped chocolatier’s table we bought four or five years ago at Spencer Swaffer’s in Arundel when a piece of paper flutters out. It’s a photograph of workmen in a chocolatier’s, Cazenave in Bayonne, with a page of printing in French and another in a language I don’t recognise but think (from its location) might be Basque or Catalan. We both get quite excited by this slip of paper and I can’t wait until R. gets home to show him. While pleased at the light the slip of paper and photograph throw on the table’s origins, R. thinks it’s merely a page torn from a relatively modern guide book and that far from being Basque or whatever the language is modern Greek. Dampening though this is, it’s still good to know more about this substantial piece of furniture which has been such a useful and dignified addition to our kitchen. It had an eventful beginning as the marble top is so heavy that in the course of getting it down the outside stairs it slipped and nearly disembowelled Rupert. Nor were we sure it would fit. But it does and our Cazenave refugee has proved ideal.