Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  Bodmin was also a reunion with the navy students who to me remained as enviable and out of reach as they’d been when I first tried to join their number at the start of National Service. Huddled on the parade ground in army fatigues one saw these lofty and elegant creatures – Mark Frankland, Jeremy Wolfenden, Robin Hope – sauntering to their places, their social and academic skills making me feel still the uncouth squaddie I’d been in basic training.

  It was around this time we all sat the Civil Service exam in Russian, a hurdle I failed ignominiously. This was a surprise as I’d earlier got a distinction in the A-level exam but then the army hadn’t bothered to explain that doing well in the Civil Service exam would mean a pay increase, so there was no incentive. The hectic competition of the first months of the course was long forgotten.

  At some point, too, we went off to take the WOSB, the board that would decide whether having been officer cadets for the last year we really were proper officer material. To my surprise (and already being something of an actor) I passed this first hurdle, the second being two weeks at Mons, the officer training unit at Aldershot. This proved more of a trial and I was failed. It dismayed me then and shames me now how much I wanted to pass. It was the first failure I’d ever had, but it was salutary. I had begun my National Service as a committed Christian, a Conservative and, I’m sure, a prig. Now, priggishness apart, I was none of these things quite, and though I didn’t know it at the time it had cured me for life of any desire to join. It’s this rather than the Russian word for ‘rolling barrage’, say, that sixty years later remains with me.

  Adapted from the Foreword to The Coder Special Archive: The Untold Story of Naval National Servicemen Learning and Using Russian During the Cold War by Tony Cash and Mike Gerrard, Hodgson Press, 2012.

  Art and Yorkshire: From Turner to Hockney

  This is a preface I wrote for an exhibition at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate in 2014. When I write about art it’s generally in extenuation of my own shortcomings and how little I know, and so it is here.

  When I was a child growing up in Leeds art was quite thin on the ground. It was wartime and though we were regularly in the art gallery on school trips it was seldom to look at the pictures most of which had been put away for the duration or altogether evacuated. In London the National Gallery’s collection had been glamorously spirited away to a cave in the depths of Wales. In Leeds, with glamour as usual not on the agenda, our pictures had just been put on a tram and taken up through Halton past the golf course to Temple Newsam.

  So if we came down from Armley to the art gallery in the Headrow it was not to be uplifted by art (difficult anyway for me aged six) but to be given a dose of propaganda, exhorted to Dig for Victory! or to Save the Ark Royal! in a series of exhibitions which included at one point a mock-up of a coal mine. If art did get a look-in it was only via the paintings we had to do when we got back to school with the promise, never made good, that the best of them might end up in the art gallery themselves.

  More satisfying was to be taken by my grandma, as we regularly were, on the same journey as the city’s paintings up to Temple Newsam House where some of the braver paintings could still be seen. Not that I was much interested. Far more fascinating was the broad-brimmed felt hat that was on display all through my childhood and which purported to be that of Oliver Cromwell, with a bullet hole in the crown to prove it.

  I can see, though, that simply for want of anywhere more exciting to go one did as a child begin to acquire the habit of art, without … and this was important … necessarily thinking art was anything special. And this persisted, so that when as I got older I used to do my homework in the City Reference Library I often took a break in the art gallery next door, where quite early on art in Yorkshire began to rub off.

  The most notable artist in this book is, of course, Turner though it’s not the Turner of the huge stormy canvases of his later years. These are kinder paintings and of views we can still recognise. What makes the Yorkshire Turners immediately accessible is that they are so topographical. Here is Kirkstall Abbey, pretty much as we know it today (though not quite as black). Here is Bolton and the transept at Fountains with the setting at this stage of Turner’s development not subordinated to some vast meteorological drama or a battle between darkness and light which reduces the ostensible subject to a corner of the canvas and even there seen through a fitful haze. They aren’t picture postcards either but they are views, prospects and works that Turner’s patrons at Farnley and Harewood could readily appreciate. They are … dare one say it … down to earth.

  Down to earth, too, in a different way is Henry Moore, much lauded now in his home county … his home Riding one should say … though it was not always so. When in 1951 the Festival of Britain included one of Moore’s reclining figures outside Leeds Art Gallery it was regularly defaced and was the subject of acrimonious correspondence in the local papers. Nowadays it’s hard to see what people got so upset about but that’s simply because the public has caught up with him, with some, glibly, even claiming to have left him behind.

  Moore’s thoughts are said to have been turned to sculpture when, as a boy, he was taken to services at Methley Church where there is indeed plenty of stonework to occupy a boy’s attention during a boring sermon. One would like to think it was something so ordinary and so local but I’m never sure that one can pin down the source of an artist’s inspiration as precisely as this even when the attribution comes from the actual artist. It’s certainly not true of literature where characters, however vivid, are rarely based on one particular person, and seldom yanked out of life into art as readily as readers think. Art is a mystery even to its practitioners, a sculptor’s inspiration in the hand as much as the eye.

  I remember when we were on holiday in Bridlington in the late forties going with my mother to Burton Agnes Hall which we were enchanted by (‘It’s like somewhere Down South,’ said my mother). Less enchanting then were Marcus Wickham-Boynton’s Post-Impressionists which I can remember visitors, myself included, being shocked by. The comments were as they say nowadays ‘robust’ with ‘I wouldn’t give that thing house room’ a typical remark. I think, even at fourteen, I had enough sense to keep my mouth shut, knowing instinctively that with art it was often a case of catching up.

  Besides, reputations come and go. The virtues of Atkinson Grimshaw nowadays go without saying whereas even as late as the 1950s he was taken to be old hat. I’ve always liked his pictures if not for purely aesthetic reasons. All too often he brings back what we have lost and his painting of Park Row in Leeds Art Gallery is a sad reminder of what Leeds used to look like before the developers got to work, his painting of Boar Lane similarly. Then too his studies of suburban Roundhay and Shadwell recall my lonely teenage walks through Woodhouse and Headingley, their leaf-covered lanes redolent of my youth. In the early sixties Grimshaw used to be recommended in the colour supplements as a good investment, an artist whose stock was going to rise. And so he was, if that is what you were after. But at his best he captures Leeds and Harrogate as I can remember them, nostalgia as fitting a response to paintings as an appreciation that is more purely aesthetic.

  Where pictures are concerned I have always found my appreciation is linked far too closely to possession. I know if I like a painting when my instinct is to walk out of the gallery with it under my raincoat. It stamps me as aesthetically immature, I can see that, and not being a Russian billionaire it’s not a craving I can indulge. But if I did own even the modest pictures I’ve fancied it would be both a distinguished and pleasing collection numbering, among others, the Camden Town paintings I first saw in Leeds Art Gallery, the Cotmans I saw at Temple Newsam and the aforesaid Grimshaws of Park Row and Boar Lane. There would also be the odd Pompeo Batoni, which figure in so many country house collections, quite silly though some of them are and a bit big for the raincoat. I’d also like one of the early drawings of Lucian Freud and the Patrick Heron portrait of Herbert Read that figured in the celebrator
y exhibition about Read a few years ago.

  This desire for possession is ignoble, particularly if possession involves as it so often does a large degree of showing off, though if the showing off includes admitting the public to the collection as it does in so many country houses it can perhaps be forgiven. What recommends ownership of even the most modest painting is that it allows the virtues and the beauty of the picture to creep into one’s affections. It’s another reason to visit and revisit galleries as a reminder of one’s old friends. Many of these pictures we know so we don’t have to cudgel our sensibilities into some sort of response; this is not a fresh encounter, it’s a reunion. Here is Fountains as Turner saw it and we remember him seeing it from last time. Here are Grimshaw’s autumnal lanes and on the Tube platform Moore’s sleepers cuddle up as the Blitz rages above.

  I had too many cold, wet holidays at Bridlington as a child readily to succumb to that locality’s undoubted charm and the latest phase of David Hockney’s development. I prefer (only once having been there) his California or his paintings done in Paris. They are the ones that would go under the raincoat. No room for his circumambient trees anyway.

  The weather in Katharine Holmes’s pictures is what rings a bell as she lives not far from us in Craven and we share the often grim climate of the Western Pennines which she seems to brave on a daily basis. Simon Palmer’s Yorkshire is a more idyllic landscape though I can’t say he idealises it any more than Katharine Holmes does hers. The corner of North Yorkshire round Jervaulx, Masham and Coverham is indeed blessed and with his evocative titles Palmer invests it with an additional layer of mystery. I can congratulate myself on having acquired two of his pictures when I’d never heard of him. This was thirty years ago in a print shop in Camden Town. My two pictures are entitled Between Lane and Field (which isn’t very exciting) and After a Late Breakfast with on the edge of the picture a spectral figure who looks as if she has strayed from a novel by Barbara Pym. One could almost dramatise Palmer’s world; they would be small dramas … women waiting on the edge of woods, solitary figures at bus stops … but always in this rapturous landscape, poems in paint with life almost stopping but going on.

  Rather than bare white rooms I like domesticity in the presentation of art, which few galleries go in for. I like paintings in rooms and even behind a vase of flowers. It’s a notion of pictures as furniture which art historians would deplore but suits me because, liking pictures to rub off, I’m happy to catch them out of the corner of my eye. Leading on from that, I don’t think it goes against the spirit of a book of this kind if I put in a plea for art to be more taken for granted.

  Not long ago I wrote a play, People, in which Dorothy Stacpoole is the aristocratic owner of a run-down Yorkshire country house which the National Trust and other interested parties are anxious to acquire. Dorothy wants things left as they are, reconciled to a degree of decay and neglect as preferable to having the place, its pictures and its furniture spruced up and made a showcase. There are masterpieces here, she admits that but she shrugs them off as they are what she has grown up with. It’s Art, yes but she doesn’t want her nose rubbed in it. She’d rather go on as she always has, taking it for granted.

  It’s a point of view with which many people found it difficult to sympathise but I think (an author not always the best person to know what he or she has written) I was putting in a plea for the ordinariness of art as opposed to the superstardom of pictures in particular that has been wished upon them by the great auction houses. Any one of the Turners in this book, the one of Fountains for instance, would sell for many hundreds of thousands of pounds but to the casual viewer it’s a familiar prospect of a well-loved place. It’s good but it’s also ordinary. Is it a masterpiece? I don’t know and I don’t much care because that gets in the way. Here where we know these paintings and often know the places they depict we can and should ignore the rest. Paintings can be friends.

  You may not agree but still, I hope you’ll enjoy the pictures.

  Foreword to Art and Yorkshire: From Turner to Hockney by Jane Sellars, Great Northern Books Ltd, 2014.

  Nights at the Opera

  The Clothes They Stood Up In is a play I failed to write. I had the idea years ago and had several goes at writing it but never got beyond twenty minutes into the first act. This is always a critical point with me; it’s when questions like ‘Haven’t we been here before?’ and ‘Whom do you think you’re kidding?’ become too insistent to ignore. If I can get past this twenty-minute barrier I can generally write the play but in this case not.

  Since I’m now at the stage where I’m beginning to tidy up a bit I decided to forget the play and try and write it as a short story for the London Review of Books. This turned out to be altogether easier and I even hit on a reasonable explanation for the total disappearance of the Ransomes’ possessions, the result of which is to leave them, as the title suggests, just with the clothes they stood up in.

  Sending the Ransomes to Covent Garden was a bit of naughtiness as it enabled me to parade some of my misgivings about opera though these, it has to be said, are based on very little knowledge. I have seen few operas, most of them before I was twenty. Except for three quarters of a production of Tristan and half a dress rehearsal of Eugene Onegin I have never seen an opera at Covent Garden nor have I been to the Coliseum. Most of the operas I have seen … and they include oddities like Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Walton’s Troilus and Cressida … I saw as a boy at the Grand Theatre in Leeds. This was in the early fifties and long before it became the home of Opera North, though it occasionally put on a season by the Carl Rosa Opera Company or hosted touring versions from Covent Garden. So there I saw Bohème, Tosca, Flying Dutchman and the Walton and the Vaughan Williams, the last two part of the celebrations to do with the Festival of Britain in 1951. But no touring productions of Mozart came to Leeds in those days so other than Bergman’s production of Magic Flute on television I have never seen a Mozart opera. I realise this is a shocking admission, though better to have seen too little than too much. There are undoubtedly people who see too much opera and let you know it too.

  Far and away the most memorable of the productions I saw at the Grand in that Festival year was Der Rosenkavalier. Sylvia Fisher was the Marschallin, Otakar Kraus Baron Ochs but who sang Sophie or Octavian I don’t remember. I was an odd boy, though, because I understood almost instinctively the renunciation and regret poured forth in the final trio by the Marschallin (with whom I utterly identified) while in other ways being a total innocent. The opera opens in the Marschallin’s bedroom as she and her lover Octavian have breakfast. I had no notion at seventeen that anything might have been going on or that Octavian might have stopped the night: I just thought that he/she had come round for tea and toast.

  Still the music has stayed with me all my life and I have never forgotten that production. There was standing room only. The side gallery had recently been painted so when I came out entranced on that July evening I found my hands, which had been gripping the rails, covered with gold. I have never seen Der Rosenkavalier since, nor wanted to, preferring the memory of that summer of 1951 unblurred.

  The operas I have seen since have been a pretty mixed bag. Filming in Ljubljana in 1986 I saw Nabucco at the local opera house and found it delightful, though the rumty-tum music hardly seemed to sort with the biblical subject and it was not until the chorus glumly filed on halfway through that I realised this was the source of that old Housewives’ Choice standard, the chorus of Hebrew slaves. The stage was so small that by the end of the big number the first line of the chorus were filing off while the last row were still waiting to get on. I didn’t see that much of the action, though, as I was sitting in the front row right above the orchestra, which to me is the best place in the house, catching the glances between the players and wondering who is sleeping with whom, far more interesting than the goings-on on the stage.

  Then there was a production of Un ballo in maschera in the Arena at Ver
ona where a sudden thunderstorm sent the orchestra scuttling off, followed soon after by the chorus until finally only the principals and the conductor were left doing the whole thing as an unaccompanied oratorio. I suppose, though, it is one of the charms of opera that, comprising several elements more things are therefore likely to go wrong … which is what one always wants to see. Needless to say I never saw Trevor Nunn’s Covent Garden production of Katya Kabanova, which figures in the documentary The House, but my expectations would have risen at the sight of the live horses. If only a night at the opera was more often like A Night at the Opera I might be persuaded to go.

  First published in the Radio Times.

  Bruce McFarlane 1903–1966

  K. B. McFarlane was one of the most influential medieval historians of post-war Britain but his name is unknown outside academic circles. This would have pleased him. He grew up in Dulwich, the son of a civil servant in the Admiralty. A day boy at Dulwich College, he won an open scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, followed by a senior demyship at Magdalen College where in 1928 he became a fellow and where the rest of his life was spent. In terms of published output his career might not seem to amount to much; there is a small book on Wyclif and a handful of scholarly articles in historical periodicals although most of his work, notably his Ford Lectures, ‘The Nobility of Medieval England’, was published after his death. Through his teaching and lecturing and the supervision of a large number of graduate students he was undoubtedly the leading medieval historian of his time. A perfectionist in both research and writing he shunned popularity and publicity and was feared for his acerbic and deflational comments. But those who broke through his reserve knew him as a gentle and companionable man.