Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  I am not altogether sure why. When the question comes up there is always talk of the social disruption that would result, as it might be the Dissolution of the Monasteries all over again. But would it? I am not after all suggesting that public schools should be abolished but a gradual reform which began with the amalgamation of state and public schools at sixth-form level, say, ought to be feasible and hardly revolutionary if the will is there. And that, of course, is the problem.

  Some of this lack of will can be put down to the unfocused parental anxiety summed up, almost comically now, in Stephen Spender’s 1930s poem:

  My parents kept me from children who were rough

  And who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes.

  Class, in a word, still. Less forgivably, there is a reluctance to share more widely (and thus to dilute) the undoubted advantages of a private education: smaller classes, better facilities and still, seemingly, a greater chance of getting to university. Beyond that, though, I’m less sure of the long-term social advantages which once would have included the accent, but hardly today. Still, and this is not to discount the many excellent schools in the state sector, a child of average ability is likely to do better at a good public school. Otherwise why would they be sent there? Were reforms to happen I suspect that the ones who would be the least worried by such an amalgamation would be the boys and girls themselves.

  It would be unsurprising if you were to discount these forthright opinions as the rantings of an old man. I am now eighty, an age that entitles one to be listened to though not necessarily heeded. I had never been much concerned with politics until the 1980s when they became difficult to avoid. Without ever having been particularly left-wing I am happy never to have trod that dreary safari from left to right which generally comes with age, a trip writers in particular seem drawn to, Amis, Osborne, Larkin, Iris Murdoch all ending up at the spectrum’s crusty and clichéd end.

  If I haven’t, it’s partly due to circumstances: there has been so little that has happened to England since the 1980s that I have been happy about or felt able to endorse. One has only had to stand still to become a radical. Though that, too, sounds like an old man talking. Still, I don’t regret it and one thing it’s always a pleasure to see on television is the occasional programme about ancient and persistent activists, old ladies recounting their early struggles for women’s rights or battles for birth control, veteran campers from Greenham Common, cheerful, good-humoured and radical as they ever were, still – though it’s not a word I care for – feisty after all these years. That to me is wisdom as disillusion is not.

  Another reason why there is a lack of will and a reluctance to meddle – a reluctance, one has to say, that does not protect the state sector where scarcely a week passes without some new initiative being announced – is that private education is seemingly not to be touched. This I think is because the division between state and private education is now taken for granted. Which doesn’t mean that it is thought to be fair, only that there is nothing that can or should be done about it.

  But if, unlike the Daily Mail, one believes that the nation is still generous, magnanimous and above all fair it is hard not to think that we all know that to educate not according to ability but according to the social situation of the parents is both wrong and a waste. Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their education ends without it dawning on them then that education has been wasted.

  I would also suggest – hesitantly, as I am not adept enough to follow the ethical arguments involved – that if it is not fair then maybe it’s not Christian either.

  How much our ideas of fairness owe to Christianity I am not sure. Souls after all are equal in the sight of God and thus deserving of what these days is called a level playing field. This is certainly not the case in education and never has been but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go on trying. Isn’t it time we made a proper start?

  Unlike today’s ideologues, whom I would call single-minded if mind came into it at all, I have no fear of the state. I was educated at the expense of the state both at school and university. My father’s life was saved by the state as on one occasion was my own. This would be the nanny state, a sneering appellation that gets short shrift with me. Without the state I would not be standing here today. I have no time for the ideology masquerading as pragmatism that would strip the state of its benevolent functions and make them occasions for profit. And why roll back the state only to be rolled over by the corporate entities that have been allowed, nay encouraged, to take its place? I am uneasy when prisons are run for profit or health services either. The rewards of probation and the alleviation of suffering are human profits and nothing to do with balance sheets. And these days no institution is immune. In my last play the Church of England is planning to sell off Winchester Cathedral. ‘Why not?’ says a character. ‘The school is private, why shouldn’t the cathedral be also?’ And it’s a joke but it’s no longer far-fetched.

  With ideology masquerading as pragmatism, profit is now the sole yardstick against which all our institutions must be measured, a policy that comes not from experience but from assumptions – false assumptions – about human nature, with greed and self-interest taken to be its only reliable attributes. In pursuit of profit, the state and all that goes with it is sold from under us who are its rightful owners and with a frenzy and dedication that call up memories of an earlier iconoclasm.

  Which brings me nearly to the end.

  One pastime I had as a boy which, thanks to my partner, I resumed in middle age was looking at old churches, ‘ruin-bibbing’ Larkin dismissively called it though we perhaps have a little more expertise than Larkin disingenuously claimed he had. I do know what rood lofts were, for instance, though, like Larkin, I’m not always able to date a roof. The charm of most medieval churches consists in what history has left, and one learns to delight in little, the dregs of history: a few fifteenth-century bench ends, an alabaster tomb chest or, where glass is concerned, just the leavings of bigotry, with ideology weakening when it came to out-of-reach tracery – the hammer too heavy, the ladder too short – so that only fragments survive, a cluster of crockets and towers maybe, the glimpse of a golden city with a devil leering down.

  In my bleaker moments these shards of history seem to me emblematic obviously of what has happened to England in the past but also a reminder and a warning of what in other respects is continuing to happen in the present, with the fabric of the state and the welfare state in particular stealthily dismantled as once the fabric of churches more rudely was, sold off, farmed out; another Dissolution, with profit taking precedence over any other consideration, and the perpetrators today as locked into their ideology and convinced of their own rightness as any of the devout louts who four and five hundred years ago stove in the windows and scratched out the faces of the saints as a passport to heaven.

  I end with the last few lines of my first play, Forty Years On. It’s set in a school with the headmaster on the verge of retirement and is what nowadays is called a play for England. It ends with the boys and staff singing the doxology ‘All Creatures that on Earth Do Dwell’, with before it, this advertisement for England:

  To let. A valuable site at the crossroads of the world.

  At present on offer to corporate clients. Outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants. Of some historical and period interest. Some alterations and improvements necessary.

  First published in the London Review of Books, 19 June 2014.

  *

  Nervous about the length of my sermon and feeling also that its tone might be too political for its surroundings, I edited it – redacted would be the modish word – some of it, I remember, as I was actually delivering it. I include these excised sections here.

  Perhaps one of the reasons why the chaplain has invited me here
this morning namely at eighty is to make a report on my life.

  ‘Pass it on,’ says the dead Hector at the end of The History Boys. ‘Pass it on.’

  But pass what on?

  I don’t actually seem to have much luggage and while I’d quite like this to consist of decent old-fashioned leather suitcases such as one sees nowadays in vintage shops I fear it’s just an ancient backpack and, more shamingly, a Tesco plastic bag, hardly fitting receptacles for one’s lessons from life … or maybe they are.

  … Today’s ideology masquerades as pragmatism with that pragmatism reduced to the simplistic assumption that the basis of human nature is self-interest, a view which discounts philanthropy, discredits altruism, with the only motive deserving of trust self-promotion and self-advancement.

  This so-called pragmatism is wicked and it is doubly so because it is held up as being both realistic and a virtue. Whereas it is shallow, shabby and all too often callous.

  I also intended to quote a passage from an earlier piece, Hymn:

  I am something of a parenthetical Anglican, my devotional brackets opening with my confirmation and the piety of adolescence which I later lost and the brackets closing, I hope not quite yet, with a continuing affection for the Church of England.

  There are different ways of being English. Churches don’t come into it much these days but that they’re so often unregarded for me augments their appeal. Since I seldom attend a service this could be thought hypocrisy. But that’s not un-English too.

  Writing about hymns I have described a not especially remarkable church at Hubberholme in North Yorkshire. Unique in the West Riding its medieval rood loft survives and on a pillar, hung slightly askew is the roll of honour of the men of the parish who died in the First War and, unusually for England, their photographs. On another pillar is a plaque to say that J. B. Priestley had his ashes scattered in the churchyard.

  ‘The rood, the roll of honour, the ashes of a writer … the remnants of history, the random trig points of time. I have never found it easy to belong. So much about England repels. Hymns help. They blur. And here among the tombs and tablets and vases of dead flowers and lists of the fallen it is less hard to feel, at least, tacked on to church and country.’

  The History Boys, Film Diary

  Having run for more than two years at the National Theatre and on Broadway The History Boys was filmed in the summer of 2005.

  14 July 2005. Nick Hytner picks me up at 8.45 and by a roundabout route the bombed bus in Tavistock Place has made necessary, we go painfully through the traffic-choked streets down to the National and the first reading of the film script of The History Boys.

  As always I’m startled by the size of the crew and the number of people in attendance, the beginning of a film like the conferences planning the Normandy landings. It’s lovely to see all the cast again, though, and to hear the script read, what new jokes there are going down well. I read in for Frances de la Tour who’s away on holiday and there’s some talk of my playing a don in one of the Oxford scenes. But not if I can help it.

  17 July. Yesterday to Broughton Castle where we filmed part of The Madness of King George. We have our sandwiches on the edge of a field of flax scattered with poppies, the earth of the cart track so rich and red the scene seems almost absurdly rural. So, too, does Broughton itself and though there are quite a few visitors, it’s not besieged as it was when I first saw it ten years ago by all the trunks and tents and paraphernalia of a film crew.

  The lady of the house, Marietta Say, is helping to show people around. She’s cheerful and downright as ever, and when I tell her I’m about to start another film with Nicholas Hytner she says that though he’s very clever as a director she secretly prefers directors who are less accomplished as they are more likely to overrun, in which case the estate will get more money.

  There are good unseen bits in this lovely house, like a plain room at the top of a staircase tower where the campaign against Charles I is said to have been plotted and which gives onto the leads where one can walk, a privilege not accorded in any other country house that I’ve come across.

  I am writing this up at a desk in a room at Watford Boys’ Grammar School, which is dressed as Mrs Lintott’s classroom for the filming of The History Boys which started this morning.

  I feel a bit lost, as so often when filming, where the author has no ordained place or prescribed function and with nothing useful to do except gossip and make myself amiable; I succumb all too readily to the lure of conviviality and sociability’s powerful drug and just sit around and watch. Our boys, with make-up, look satisfyingly younger than their real Watford Grammar School counterparts who are themselves part of ‘directed action’ and on cue play loudly (and quite violently) on the field outside.

  I come away at three o’clock, my only contribution today to give Stephen Campbell Moore the correct pronunciation of prepuce.

  21 July. A touch of writer’s paranoia today. The trickiest and in some ways the most shocking scene in the play is the sixth-former Dakin’s virtual seduction of Irwin, the young supply teacher. It’s a difficult scene to play because Irwin, warned by the older schoolmaster, Hector, not to make a fool of himself over the boy, resists Dakin’s (very specific) advances throughout the scene until he suddenly caves in and they fix up a date.

  Why does he cave in? Partly because Dakin is, literally, irresistible: apart from being good-looking his will is much stronger than Irwin’s and where sex is concerned he has all the know-how. On stage, though it was always a gripping scene, it wasn’t always plain what prompted Irwin’s surrender and so in the film script I have given this a physical trigger and at the point where Irwin is wavering I make Dakin touch him.

  Chatting to Stephen Campbell Moore (Irwin) and Dominic Cooper (Dakin) yesterday I discover that having rehearsed the scene they are to do no touching. Normally Nick H. would tell me of any departure from the script and since it’s seldom we disagree there’s no problem. This time, though, he hasn’t and I wonder if it’s because he knows I feel quite strongly about it. At any rate it will have to be talked through before the scene is shot.

  Waiting for my car to pick me up this morning I rehearse what I need to say about the scene, the only one in the play in which anyone comes even close to getting their heart’s desire so that Dakin’s hand on Irwin’s chest or his belly as I’ve actually written it, is highly charged. The car is late and I know the scene will have been set up by now and perhaps even be shooting. I telephone to find no car has been ordered and one won’t be free for half an hour. I sit there waiting, wondering if this is deliberate and a way of forestalling any objections I might have and avoiding the inevitable confrontation.

  When I eventually get to the set they have indeed rehearsed the scene and done at least one take (with no touching). I say that some sort of physical contact seems to me essential, but the actors can’t make it work though I still think that what I’ve suggested, Dakin’s finger idly sliding inside Irwin’s shirt would do it. What also works, though, is a much longer pause before Irwin surrenders and this, finally, is what we settle for … though whether the pause will survive in the editing I’m not sure.

  Of course there has been no plot to keep me off the set while the scene is shot and I laugh about it afterwards. But I can think of other playwrights who would need more reassurance on that point than I do, and who would make more of a fuss about any divergence from what they’ve written.

  The other lurking fear I have about scenes like this – and which ties in with Posner’s view in the play – is that where sex is concerned, directors think I’m not that sort of writer (just as Posner is thought not that sort of boy) and so don’t entirely trust what I’ve written. It’s one of the reasons I took to writing the occasional short story because in that form I could express myself without let or hindrance.

  (It’s interesting though, that when I later watch the dress rehearsal of the second cast doing the stage version I have exactly the same feeling abo
ut the scene, namely that it needs some sort of touch. Maybe that’s what the audience is feeling also and it not happening is one reason why the scene works.)

  Because of the shot Sam Anderson has to move his desk. ‘Don’t tell me. It’s black boys to the back again.’

  We eat our lunch on picnic tables outside the classroom in a huge tearing wind that topples the glasses and snatches away the plates. The school proper broke up at noon and the vast playing field is deserted, the high suburban trees roaring in the wind. I wander across the empty grass feeling as once I did fifty and more years ago when I was in my own last days at school. Meanwhile our boys play football against the playground wall with an openness and abandon I have never managed in all my life.

  23 July. Though I knew there would not be time in the film to see the home lives of the boys I was hoping we would be able to include a brief collage of their various parents.

  Lockwood, I thought, would come from a poor background; his mother is a single parent and while wanting him to go on to university doesn’t know how it is to be paid for. Thus he is seen at the start of the film working in the holidays as a milkman; he goes up for the scholarship interview in his trainers and ends up enlisting in the army as this will pay for him to go to Oxford.

  Whereas we never see Mrs Lockwood, we do get glimpses of some of the other parents, a few of whom were going to have a line or two. Mrs Scripps for instance, who is uncomfortable with her son’s piety. (‘I said to him, “Jesus is such a bad role model. You’d be better off with somebody like Paul McCartney.”’)

  Mrs Dakin: He’s full of this new master. Sexual intercourse seems to have taken a back seat.

  And Mrs Crowther: He’s a lovely-looking lad. Get him in a bathing costume and he’d walk it. And these posh places, black isn’t necessarily a handicap. It can be a plus.