Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  I ought to be embarrassed by these recurrences and did I feel they had anything to do with me I might be. But these personages slip in through the back door or disguised as somebody else altogether and it’s only when, like Stuart, they want their say and make a plea for recognition and acknowledgement that I realise the uninvited guest is here again.

  I ought to know who this figure is, but I’m not sure that I do. Is he myself as a young man at Oxford baffled by the academic world? Is he one of the young actors in my first play, Forty Years On (1968), many of whom I feared would have wasted lives? Is he even one of the procession of young actors who have auditioned over the years to play such parts and who have had to be sent away disappointed?

  Some of the yearning felt in this play by Stuart in the houses of his clientele reflects my own wonder as an undergraduate going to tutorials in the vast Victorian houses of north Oxford. I was there on a different, and more legitimate, errand from Stuart, but to see a wall covered in books was an education in itself, though visual and aesthetic as much as intellectual. Books do furnish a room and some of these rooms had little else, and there in a corner the don under a lamp. Sometimes though, there would be paintings, and occasionally more pictures than I’d ever seen on one wall, together with vases, urns, pottery and other relics – real nests of a scholarly life. And there were wonders, too: drinking soup, once, from fifteenth-century Apostle spoons, medieval embroideries thrown over chair backs, a plaque in the hall that might be by Della Robbia.

  These days I think of such houses when I go to museums like the Ashmolean or the Fitzwilliam, where the great masterpieces are plumped out with the fruits of bequests from umpteen academic households: paintings (particularly in the Fitzwilliam), antiquities, treasures brought back from Egypt and Italy in more franchised days than ours, squirrelled away up Norham Road and Park Town, the components of what Stuart rightly sees as a world from which he will forever be excluded – and from which I felt excluded too, though with less reason.

  Introduction to Hymn

  That I wrote Hymn is entirely thanks to the composer George Fenton, whom I’ve known since he appeared as a schoolboy in my first play, Forty Years On, and who has written music for many of the plays since. In 2001 the Medici Quartet commissioned him to write a piece commemorating their thirtieth anniversary and he asked me to collaborate. Hymn was the result. First performed at the Harrogate Festival in August 2001, it is a series of memoirs with music. Besides purely instrumental passages for the quartet, many of the speeches are underscored, incorporating some of the hymns and music I remember from my childhood and youth.

  At the first performance, in a later one at the Buxton Festival and in the live recording we made for the BBC, I played myself. Though I’d never appeared with musicians on a concert platform I didn’t anticipate any difficulty. Having to memorise a script is what gives me stage fright, but here it was entirely in order to read the words; the musicians were reading from a score and so was I.

  What I’d not anticipated was how in a concert situation the narrator is just one element in the composition, with timing to some extent taken out of his or her hands. There was a moment in the first performance when I stood up for my first speech, saw George cue me in and thought, just for a split second, ‘If I don’t speak now the whole thing falls apart.’ I did speak, though my hesitation was enough to make it a slightly rough passage. It was enough, too, to make me more nervous than I had been … which was probably a good thing. That apart, the performance went off well. It was on the stage of the Royal Hall in Harrogate, an auditorium designed by the Edwardian theatre architect Frank Matcham and a riot of exuberant plasterwork. This was in August 2001. Ten days later the roof fell in and the theatre was closed for the next five years.

  Never having worked with a string quartet before, rehearsals for me were something of an eye-opener. What astonished me was the freedom with which members of the quartet felt entitled to comment on each other’s performances, speaking up when they felt one or other of them was too loud, say, or not incisive enough, comments which the player in question either took in good part or which provoked a reasoned defence. At no point, though, did I detect any animosity.

  At first I explained this to myself by thinking that this particular quartet had been playing together for thirty years and it was familiarity, bred out of friendship and working together, that made them so magnanimous and forgiving. But no, I was told; string quartets and chamber music groups in general were most often like this.

  I kept thinking of actors in a comparable situation where, should one actor venture to criticise or comment on the performance of a colleague, it would provoke resentment and sulks and certainly an appeal to the director. If an actor does have any opinions to offer on another actor’s performance, the etiquette, the ironclad etiquette, is that such comments should be made to the director, who will then relay them to the actor in question in the form of direction and with no hint as to their source. Actors, one is always told, need to be loved. Quartet players are seemingly thicker-skinned.

  Of course I am not the first to have noted the musicians’ resilience, and indeed the string quartet has been used as a model in business schools to exemplify a readiness to accept constructive criticism without hurt feelings. What players do quarrel about, if they ever do, I’m not sure.

  It has always been a mystery to me how it was my father came to learn the violin, though, like so many things about my parents’ early life, I never thought to ask him while I still could. It’s an unrewarding instrument for a beginner, the more so in his case because he received scant encouragement at home. His mother died when he was a child, leaving his father with four sons to bring up. He quickly married again, this time a sour-faced woman, a stalwart of the chapel whose name I have never known as she was always referred to in the family as ‘The Gimmer’, a gimmer being a sheep that has had no lambs. Though my father was allowed to practise the violin in the front room, it was only by the light of the street lamp that came in through the window. But still he persisted, perhaps knowing that he had perfect pitch and could name the notes if he heard someone else playing.

  How he knew so much orchestral music is another question I never asked him. If there were orchestral concerts in Leeds when he was a young man I doubt that he could have afforded to go, and it would have been with his first and only girlfriend, my mother, and she never mentioned it. Brass bands are a possibility and it’s true some of the music he knew – Poet and Peasant, Ruy Blas and Rossini’s Semiramide – was the kind of showpiece stuff that bands went in for. It was only in middle age that my parents would have had a wireless, when he started playing along to that.

  As time went on it became increasingly difficult to question him about the past as he took the interrogation to mean he was coming to the end of his life, which at that time he wasn’t, his relatively early death wholly unexpected. Still, remembering what a struggle he’d had to acquire his skill, it must have been galling when he tried to pass it on to my brother and me how unserious we were about it and how reluctant to practise. He had practised with no encouragement at all; his pampered sons couldn’t even be bothered. ‘Now the Day Is Over’ isn’t a hymn one hears very often nowadays, but if ever I do it transports me to the attic at 92A Otley Road where I am scraping it out on the half-size violin.

  These days, though, hymns are changing. Gone are the days when I could sing them without looking at the book. The standards these days – ‘Make Me a Channel of Thy Peace’, ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Lord of the Dance’ – have me glued to the hymn book and not all that sure of the tune. Even with the old standards – ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’, ‘O Worship the King’ – they’ve sometimes been amended to suit the taste of the time and it’s like missing a step on the stair.

  Hubberholme, the church at the very tip of the West Riding where Hymn finishes up, isn’t an especially beautiful church inside, scraped as so many churches were in the nineteenth century and the plaster ta
ken off to reveal the unlovely stonework underneath. Still, it has its rood loft and a nice atmosphere. It also has pews made by Thompson of Kilburn, the famous Mouseman, and on the occasions when I’ve called at the church to look at the rood loft the only other visitors have been Thompson fans scouring the pews for the trademark mouse. They never give the rood loft a second glance, making me feel somewhat superior, though between Larkin’s ‘ruin-bibber, randy for antique’ and the mousehunters I don’t suppose there’s much to choose.

  There are different ways of being English. Churches don’t come into it much these days and 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 either.

  Introduction to Cocktail Sticks

  From time to time at literary festivals and suchlike I do readings, mainly of extracts from my published diaries, which are generally followed by a question-and-answer session. One of the questions that regularly comes up is whether I have any misgivings or regrets about having written so much about my parents. ‘No’ is the short answer, and I certainly don’t feel, as the questioner sometimes implies, that there is any need for apology. ‘Why do you write about Yorkshire when half the time you don’t live there?’ is the question in a different form. ‘Why do you write about your parents when they’re no longer around?’

  Distance is one answer – perspective. But I will often quote the American writer Flannery O’Connor who, in Mystery and Manners (1969), said that anyone who survives their childhood has enough material to last them the rest of their days.

  But I don’t quite see it like that either, as in my case (and this is partly what Cocktail Sticks is about) I had hardly written about them readily, and it took me a while before in a formal way I did, as my first volume of autobiography, Writing Home, wasn’t published until 1994, while the second, Untold Stories, was ten years or so later. It’s true that many of the TV plays I have written about the North owe a good deal to my parents’ way of talking and looking at things, which is what my mother means when she remarks in Cocktail Sticks, ‘By, I’ve given you some script!’ But I don’t think that is what the question implies, which is more that my parents were a shy and retiring couple, so to write about them even after their deaths is to violate their privacy, with autobiography a kind of betrayal. Not surprisingly, I don’t buy this at all.

  Both my parents felt constrained, even imprisoned, by their lack of education, though it was as much temperament that held them back. That needed talking about, it seemed to me, just as my mother’s depression needed to be brought into the open, if only because this was a more common experience than is (or was then) generally admitted. That it seemed to me was no betrayal. And no betrayal to dramatise it either. And I’m not sure they wouldn’t agree. Flannery O’Connor again: ‘I once had the feeling I would dig my mother’s grave with my writing, too, but I later discovered this was vanity on my part. They are hardier than we think.’

  That said, it can be no fun having a writer in the family, always on the make, never happy to let things lie undescribed or leave them unremembered, and ready, too, to tweak experience if the drama or the narrative demands it. Philip Roth, keeping watch at his father’s deathbed, knows that he is there out of affection but also because, as he admits, he will one day write about it. ‘It is’, he says, ‘an unseemly profession.’

  Had I had any thoughts of ‘being a writer’ (which is not the same as writing), I would have been discouraged when I looked at my family, so ordinary did they seem and so empty the landscape. To be brought up in Leeds in the forties was to learn early on the quite useful lesson that life is generally something that happens elsewhere. True, I was around in time for the Second World War, but so far as Leeds was concerned that was certainly something that happened elsewhere. From time to time the sirens went and my brother and I were wrapped in blankets and hustled out to the air-raid shelter that stood outside our suburban front door, there to await the longed-for rain of bombs. Sheffield caught it, Liverpool caught it, but Leeds never. ‘Why should it? I live here,’ was my reasoning, though there was a more objective explanation. The city specialised in the manufacture of ready-made suits and the cultivation of rhubarb, and though the war aims of the German High Command were notoriously quixotic, I imagine a line had to be drawn somewhere. Thus in the whole course of hostilities very few bombs fell on Leeds and those that did were promptly torn apart by schoolboys starved of shrapnel.

  All through the war there was a slogan painted on a wall in Wellington Street: ‘Start the Second Front Now’. What this injunction meant I never knew at the time … It was still there in the early sixties, when it fell, as most things eventually do in Leeds, to the bulldozer. When with the invasion of Normandy the Second Front actually did start it still remained a mystery. We were told that particular day was D-Day and I’m not sure we weren’t given a holiday, but I still managed to feel cheated. If this was D-Day, I reasoned that logically there must already have been an A-Day, a B-Day and a C-Day, and me being me and Leeds being Leeds we had, of course, missed them. I note at the age of ten a fully developed ability not quite to enjoy myself, a capacity I have retained intact ever since. I think this is one of the things that Cocktail Sticks is about.

  It’s also about finding something to write about. As I’ve said, childhood is always high on a writer’s list but in the 1940s it was as if childhood itself was on the ration, dull, without frills and done up like the groceries of the time in plain utility packets. We were not well off but nor were we poor, and we were, I imagine, happy. Home – and this is Cocktail Sticks – was nothing to write home about. Larkin says that they fuck you up, your mum and dad. And if you end up writing, then that’s fine because if they have, then you’ve got something to write about. But if they haven’t fucked you up, you don’t have anything to write about, so then they’ve fucked you up good and proper.

  Leeds at that time was an almost wholly nineteenth-century city which, like most Northern cities before the clean air campaign, was black as soot. Growing up, I could see some of its Victorian grandeur, but I was like Hector in The History Boys, ‘famished for antiquity’. As a boy in a provincial city I was famished for celebrity too and famished, if the truth be told, for a good deal else besides, but which, being a religious boy, I wasn’t supposed to think about.

  Northern writers like to have it both ways. They set their achievements against the sometimes imaginary squalor of their origins and gain points for transcendence while at the same time implying that Northern life is richer and in some undefined way truer and more honest than a life of southern comfort. ‘Look, we have come through’ is the stock version of it, though why a childhood in the (ex-) industrial North should be thought a handicap as distinct from some featureless suburb in South London isn’t plain. True, if you’re born in Barnsley and set your sights on being Virginia Woolf, it isn’t going to be roses all the way. And had she been born in Doncaster I can’t imagine Ivy Compton-Burnett coming to much. Though she could have written A Pit and its Pitfalls.

  Still, education was movement; it was departure. Towering above the mean streets from which many of their pupils came, the schools of Leeds were like liners, their rows of windows lit up on winter afternoons as if great ships of learning, waiting to bear their passengers away from the dirt and fog of this smoking city to the promise of another life, or at least a more distant one. Because though that other life might only mean an office or the counter of a better class of shop, it was at least elsewhere, not Leeds. So, like the steam trains loading up in the city’s City and Central Stations, these schools were conveyances. Education was a way out.

  There was another way out. The Infirmary behind the town hall was a way out, too, with the first-class passengers berthed round the corner in the Brotherton Wing, and up Beckett Street a poorer ship, St James’s, where everyone travelled steerage, though some got no further than the cemetery they could see from the windows. Ships of ho
pe; ships of fear.

  All of which is better put by Richard Hoggart, writing about his own education at Cockburn High School.

  Walking home at about 4.15 or so in the middle of winter when the street lights have already begun to come on I would look round as I finished crossing the clinkered ‘Moor’ and still see over the house-tops, half a mile away, the pale yellow glow of its classrooms and corridors and its cupolas standing up half silvery-grey in the near-darkness. It exercised as powerful a pull on my imagination as Oxford’s dreaming spires on Matthew Arnold’s or Christminster on Jude the Obscure’s.

  (A Local Habitation, pp. 182–3)

  The year I graduated at Oxford happened to be the year Richard Hoggart published The Uses of Literacy, which was both a celebration of and a lament for working-class culture. Since much of it was about Leeds, it rang all sorts of bells, but partly because Hoggart was writing about Hunslet and not Headingley and because I thought him closer to my parents’ generation than my own, I saw his book as a description of their lives rather than mine. Hunslet was nearer both topographically and socially to the mean streets of my grandmother’s Wortley than it was to the more salubrious suburb of Armley where I’d been brought up. So, not for the first time – and it’s a recurring theme in Cocktail Sticks – I felt our family wasn’t typical; we no more made the lower grade than we did a higher one.