by Alan Bennett
God is not a deity reverence for whom can be performance-related.
15 August. Rain stops me doing my usual half-hour cycle ride in Regent’s Park and when I do go later on it’s so busy I divert to the Nash terraces which are always deserted. Seats overlooking the (very dull) gardens would add to their amenity but since this would fetch more people in I imagine it’s the last thing the well-to-do (and the well-to-do diplomatic) tenants would want. There are generally one or two cars parked with their engines running and the chauffeurs asleep but no other signs of life. In the evening I watch a programme about VE Day (though today has been marked by celebrations for the seventieth anniversary of VJ Day). Both of these I remember as I was aged eleven on 9 May 1945, i.e. VE Day + 1, but both VE and VJ Days are indistinguishable in memory, my lasting impression of both that of the sudden availability of light, shone on floodlit public buildings which I’d never seen before and streaming away prodigally into the night sky. This was a regular feature thereafter and still an object of wonder (as late as the Festival of Britain in 1951 and on into the early fifties). Those in the programme were often younger than me and didn’t have much memorable to offer, far and away the best being David Attenborough, nineteen in 1945.
16 August. This aspect of things comes up again when I go round to the Millers this morning for coffee. Christina Noble is there who is working on some sort of family history and she treats me as a living witness to times past. Was venison ever on the ration? I think not, though Leeds butchers wouldn’t in any case be its usual retail outlet and certainly not Bennett’s High Class Meat Purveyors of Otley Road. What about trotters, were they on the ration? No and tripe certainly wasn’t though even at eighty-one it still seems droll to me to be treated as a historical repository or the oldest inhabitant. The VE Day programme treated rationing as a national ordeal when it was nothing of the sort, butter short admittedly but the availability of food was seasonal and deliciously so as I’ve mentioned before, new potatoes, strawberries and all soft fruit tastier then than they have ever seemed since.
23 August. Countryfile touches on – it hardly tackles – the now permitted potash mine in the North Yorkshire National Park with John Craven posing against the idyllic landscape and asking some toothless questions. The usual justifications are put forward: local employment (no one says how much or how guaranteed it is); local prosperity, though with no questions as to who the shareholders are and where based – certainly not in the North Riding and probably not even in the country. No wonder Corbyn is ahead of the rest.
1 September. Oliver Sacks dies, my first memory of whom was as an undergraduate in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a placenta. At that time I don’t think I knew what a placenta was except that I knew it didn’t come with chips.
11 September. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he calls ‘the smart state’. This seems to be a state that gets away with doing as little as possible for its citizens and shuffling as many responsibilities as it can onto anyone who thinks they can make a profit out of them. I am glad there wasn’t a smart state when I was being brought up in Leeds, a state that was unsmart enough to see me and others like me educated free of charge and sent on at the city’s expense to university, provided with splendid libraries, cheap transport and a terrific art gallery, not, of course to mention the city’s hospitals.
Smart to Mr Cameron seems to mean doing as little as one can get away with and calling it enterprise. Smart as in smart alec, smart of the smart answer, which I’m sure Mr Cameron has to hand. Dead smart.
14 September. Watch, though without intending to, J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. Without intending to, I suppose, because I never feel Alastair Sim’s performance in the film can be bettered. Tonight it’s David Thewlis who’s very, very good, bleak, unmannered and while I miss some of Sim’s silkiness every bit as good. It’s a play I’d dearly love to have written (as also his When We Are Married) and gives me a pang of conscience. Back in the nineties when I was doing some programmes on Westminster Abbey, the dean, Michael Mayne, talked to me about whether Larkin should be in Poets’ Corner … an obvious yes on the strength of ‘Church Going’ let alone the rest. He also wanted my thoughts on another candidate, J. B. Priestley whom several supporters were pushing but on whom Michael M. wasn’t keen. I hedged, I think, certainly not pressing Priestley’s claim which on the evidence of tonight’s An Inspector Calls fills me with regret and self-reproach.
23 September. A minor breakthrough today when I go to my barber’s, Ossie’s in Parkway, and for the first time in my life I allow Azakh, the barber to trim my eyebrows. It’s a cosmetic refinement I’ve always resisted on the assumption that once cut the eyebrows would grow more luxuriantly and I feared I should end up looking like Bernard Ingham. However I am getting on and there will scarcely be time for the development of comparable thickets so today I am tidied up. The last time I remember having related thoughts was when I was seventeen and had not yet started to shave. Though most of my contemporaries had been shaving for years, being fair and rather behind the rest in my case there was no need and I knew that once I started I should have to go on. A few months later I was in the army when the decision was taken out of my hands.
3 October. Denis Healey dies, whom I would have been happy to see prime minister. Met twice … once when I was cycling briefly (and slowly) on the pavement in Gower Street where he was waiting for a bus and he stopped me, saying, ‘Now then, young Bennett’ (I would have been fifty at the time). Then twenty years later we were both at a reception in Downing Street for Fanny Waterman, founder of the Leeds Pianoforte Competition. I was with Rupert and the joke was the same as at the bus stop as he shook hands with him before indicating me and saying to him, ‘And is this your young man?’
11 October. In Primrose Hill Books I glance though Volume 2 of Charles Moore’s biography of Mrs Thatcher, noting that it recycles Graham Turner’s mendacious interview with me and other so-called artists and intellectuals in which we were supposed to have dismissed Mrs T. out of snobbery. This was the thesis Turner had come along anxious to prove and bore scant relation to the interview itself, which concentrated on her actual policies. It’s only worth noting because it’s an interview that often gets quoted e.g. in Noel Annan’s Our Age. I did detest Mrs Thatcher and deplore her legacy. But she was a grocer’s daughter as I am a butcher’s son. Snobbery doesn’t come into it.
13 October. As floor-covering the red carpet is pretty unprepossessing, threadbare, stabbed by too many high heels and, I imagine, weed on by dogs. It fronts the Odeon, Leicester Square for the premiere of The Lady in the Van and penned on its edges are dozens of reporters and photographers from the nation’s press. I am put to begin at one end, Alex Jennings in the middle and Nick Hytner at the other and together we work the line, though the journalists, both newspaper and radio, are so jammed together that as one is questioned and photographed by one reporter the questions and one’s answers are overheard by the next in line who often just puts them again. To begin with I try and vary my replies but invention soon flags and nobody seems to mind if I say the same thing three times over with three minutes max per interview. It’s all very jolly, some of them shake hands and there are occasional selfies but even when we’ve been at it an hour we haven’t reached the end of the line. Then we are called inside to be shepherded with Maggie Smith through the foyer, down the back stairs and onto the stage where we are introduced and shown to the audience by Nick. We don’t have to speak and are a bit nonplussed with the audience just wanting to get on with the film. So by the time we get to our seats in the balcony the film has started. It goes well though as with other films I’ve done I worry that one laugh treads too closely on the heels of the next, which I’ve never managed to solve. Still people are crying at the end and seem to be happy.
23 October, Yorkshire. With the trip to N
ew York looming I am unsurprised when on my way home I sprain my ankle, such avoidance mechanisms a not unusual prelude to major departures. I phone my GP who is concerned that it might be a clot and recommends going to A&E at Airedale Hospital where I should have an X-ray. It’s early Saturday evening and Casualty very quiet, raising hopes we may be in and out quite quickly. We sit there slowly doing the Guardian Quick Crossword, noting as so often in institutions the presence of characters who seem habitués, knowing the procedures, familiar with the staff, A&E their scene. Quiet though it is, it’s a couple of hours before we’re seen by a youngish consultant who briskly disposes of any likelihood of there being a clot and sees no point in doing an X-ray as it would just reveal wear and tear, ‘the wear and tear of being …’ and he glances at my form ‘… of being eighty-one’. He’s not unfriendly but not chatty either and I wonder whether we are unwittingly contributing to one of the problems of the NHS, namely GPs referring patients to A&E just to be on the safe side. Out by nine o’clock we go the back way home, with an owl flying across the road near West Marton. Curry for supper after which I limp to bed, the hospital episode not as wearisome as might have been expected and R. even enjoying it.
27 October. To record Private Passions, Michael Berkeley’s Radio 3 programme which I’ve always liked as more relaxed and less formulaic than Desert Island Discs, which was apt, particularly in the days of Sue Lawley, to bowl one a googly (‘And would you say you were gay?’). Mind you I’ve always resisted Private Passions too if only because my musical appreciation is so adolescent and tied to memory with no specialist musical knowledge to it at all. Under Michael Berkeley’s informed and benevolent eye the programme is a real contribution to the reputation of the BBC, or the old BBC anyway.
The studio is in a little house off Shepherd’s Bush Green, putting me in mind of those days in the sixties when I worked two days a week for Ned Sherrin and Not So Much a Programme in Lime Grove. It’s a nice group of people and a happy atmosphere and I’m grateful to the young assistant Oliver Soden whose opportune postcard persuaded me to do it. I talk about Dad playing his fiddle to the wireless on Sunday nights during the war and musical evenings at my grandma’s on Gilpin Place when Aunt Eveline, a sometime pianist for the silent films, would regale us with the latest hits from Ivor Novello and latterly Oklahoma. I had wanted some Kathleen Ferrier but, with her recordings being relatively few, had had to settle for her singing part of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, regretting that she had never recorded Gerontius or Strauss’s Four Last Songs. My parents had heard her sing one winter night in 1947 in a concert she gave in Brunswick Chapel in Leeds but I thought I had never heard her. It was only when I was going through some old programmes that I came across the brochure for the 1950 Leeds Triennial Festival, tickets for which we had been given by a Mr Tansley who was the Corporation entertainments manager and a customer at Dad’s shop. And good seats they were, Row B in the balcony of the Victoria Hall and, as we discovered, directly behind the royal party which consisted of the Princess Royal and the Harewoods, who were the festival’s patrons. Everyone around us was in long dresses or dinner jackets. I was sixteen and in my school blazer with Mam in her best frock. Dad knew better than to go and wouldn’t be persuaded, so to my acute embarrassment (of which at sixteen I was already a connoisseur), I had to escort Mam. I was no stranger to the Victoria Hall, going there every Saturday to hear the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra but looking round at the cream of Leeds society I knew that they were seldom to be seen at a normal concert in the town hall unless as in this case it had the cachet of royalty.
It also had the cachet of Sir Thomas Beecham who made one of his witty speeches before embarking on a performance of Dvořák’s Stabat Mater … to my mind (though I’ve never heard it since) a pretty dreary piece. So it was only years later that looking through my programmes I realised I had heard Kathleen Ferrier. She had been one of the singers. I’ve never forgotten that concert but it wasn’t her performance that I remembered … or even noticed.
31 October, New York. Here yesterday in the lap of luxury as our first-class fare is paid partly by the New York Public Library, which is giving me an award and the rest by Sony which is producing The Lady in the Van. I wonder, though, looking at our fellow passengers, who is paying for them so ordinary do they look and even downright scruffy. Perhaps they’re all in the music business in which case, this not being a private jet BA First Class is maybe a bit of a comedown. Most luxurious for me, though is that having sprained my ankle last week I get a wheelchair at both ends which, particularly at JFK, is a great blessing as in immigration we sidetrack the queue. There’s a nasty bit of turbulence in mid-Atlantic though, which no amount of luxury can banish. It doesn’t bother R. who sleeps throughout but has me gibbering, however smooth it is flying for me never other than an ordeal.
This morning we take a cab to the market in Union Square, a real pleasure. It’s partly that though crowded with stalls selling farm produce, cheese, fruit and whatever it’s resolutely ordinary with no hint of middle-class worthiness about it. Then too the places all the produce has been driven in from in the back of beyond of New York State reminds one how rural America is still and which one can detect in the faces of the people behind the stalls. Maybe I’m sentimental about this and maybe Borough Market (where I’ve never been) is much the same. But I find myself cheered by the diversity of New York as last time I was here. Then we happened to coincide with a march against the Iraq war, a march so big and close-knit we joined it simply in order to work our way across the street.
Then back to Lynn W.’s apartment on 16th Street where I sit out on the terrace in the sun.
2 November. Most of the day spent in a back room of the Four Seasons Hotel being interviewed with Nick Hytner and Alex Jennings by a succession of journalists and correspondents. They question us about the making of the film and the story behind it but most of all about Maggie Smith, who because she does so little publicity remains a creature of mystery. Alex like me is anecdotal, telling stories about the filming and Miss Shepherd whereas Nick, schooled by his time at the National, makes what would be called ‘bullet points’ about the film and how it came to be made and so is, I think a more useful interviewee. On the other hand if an interviewer bores him he finds it hard to hide so that Alex and I become absurdly over-animated just to compensate.
In the evening to the New York Public Library where I am to be made a Library Lion. When I said this to my friend David Vaisey, librarian emeritus of the Bodleian he remarked, ‘Well I just hope you’re not one of those aged lions that gets shot by a mid-western dentist’, a welcome joke as he’s just recovering from a stroke. It’s a black tie affair which I only found out the day before we left so I stick to my Anderson and Sheppard suit (current record: four funerals and three memorial services). As I’m leaving my coat the attendant hands me what I take to be the coat check but in fact it’s the lion itself on a red ribbon which I wear all evening. Spotted (also wearing his lion) is Salman Rushdie. There are half a dozen of us being lionised and we are lined up and photographed and made much of before going upstairs to a magnificent supper, getting home thoroughly knackered about eleven. How people lead a social life is beyond me.
13 November, Yorkshire. The film ‘opens well’ as they say and here in the village people have been going down to Skipton to see it. I don’t even know where the cinema is. They show films occasionally in the village hall but whether The Lady in the Van will ever achieve such heights I doubt as none of my other stuff has. Years ago when I was still writing TV plays which didn’t always go down well one of the village ladies complained: ‘I can’t understand how he writes the plays that he does with two such lovely parents as he had.’
2 December. Any day on which one has to spend time watching the House of Commons on TV will tend to depress and so it is with the Syrian bombing debate. Jeremy Corbyn gets no credit for his convictions or for respecting those of his party by licensing a free (i.e. unwhipped) vote. Instead he is
ragged throughout his speech by loutish Tories, most of whom have no convictions to speak of but just do as they’re told. Still at least nobody says it’s the House of Commons at its best, which it decidedly isn’t. Now if the campaigns in Kuwait and Iraq are anything to go by what will follow will be extensive coverage of our boys taking off from Cyprus and their happy fireworks in the desert.
And this is what happens, with the BBC commentator on the edge of the airfield at Akrotiri, counting them out and counting them back, though not the planes but rather the bombs they are carrying … and not bringing back.
9 December. Another session with Adam Low for next year’s documentary. Note that though Adam positions himself beside the camera and I address what I have to say to him there is a definite difference between my ordinary conversational tone of voice and the tone in which I address the camera, which is never entirely ‘natural’ but always tinged with ‘performance’. I am not talking to a person but to an audience. I don’t know how to avoid this. If I had to say what is wrong I would simply say that the person talking isn’t me. But whatever it is I do, I do it this morning from ten until one thirty when I have some soup and a piece of chocolate before going out for my therapeutic bike ride in Regent’s Park.
27 December. I am reading Anatomy of a Soldier by Harry Parker whom I’ve met and who has sent me a pre-publication copy. It’s hard to read and in every way with what is the hardest the knowledge that this is not just a novel written out of someone’s head but a book written on his own body. It’s about a soldier who is blown up by a roadside bomb as Parker himself was and who loses his legs just as he did. As the narrative comes up again and again to the moment of the explosion I find I can only read two or three pages at a time. So that is hard. Hard, too, is the way he has chosen to tell it through the items of equipment he carried … his phone, the camp bed on which he sleeps, the items of medical equipment used on the operating table and the plasma and the drugs that drip into him. Even the bacteria that get into his wounds have a voice. It’s marvellously told and this way of telling it … giving the inanimate a voice … is both engrossing and distancing and I know of nothing quite like it. At the start there is something of Hardy’s The Convergence of the Twain to the story, the young officer on patrol and the even younger tribesman planting the bomb and how they come together. Which they do again and again as the story is told and re-told. I’m so anxious to read it right and report it right as having finished it I must now write to him about what is in effect his own life. A year or so ago I got some stick for saying I seldom read contemporary English novels never feeling they had much to tell me. Now I am rebuked, though it is of course more than a novel and a tale of both sides, the ending unbearable.