by Alan Bennett
The priest is young and on the plump side and, were he playing the part, way over the top. He apologizes, as parsons tend to do these days, that we are in a church at all and says that though there will have to be a prayer at the end of the proceedings, it will not so much be a prayer as ‘an opportunity for our private commemoration’.
Albert Finney reads a preface in his rich, plump actor’s voice, then George Axelrod, who’s inaudible. Alan Brien talks, but, as is the way of these occasions, more about himself than about the deceased. Then Penelope Gilliatt comes to the chancel steps, smiling, smiling and smiling. ‘Your Royal Highness,’ she begins – and that is the last we hear. It is as if a mouse is at the microphone. Still, she is plainly speaking, and the audience lean forward to catch the faint squeakings. People cough. A note is passed down the aisle, written as it turns out by Irving Wardle: ‘Tell her to speak up.’ It gets as far as Shevelove, who turns round and says in tones much louder than hers, ‘I certainly will not!’ and so Penelope whispers on before Tom Stoppard concludes.
Then out into the rain, with a vast crush in the doorway. Huw Wheldon grips my arm: ‘An impressive service, I think. A fitting tribute. Unfortunate about that woman. One couldn’t hear.’ Codron is ahead of me in a white suit, and I note the newly gilded panel to Richard Beckinsale. On the steps Peter Nichols had already lit up, and there are people asking for (and getting) autographs. As I go for my bike I see Peter Brook surrounded by reporters, and it is his picture that is in all the papers next day, standing under an umbrella with Mrs Tynan.
Back at rehearsal Joan Plowright makes no comment on my being in a suit. Olivier had apparently been asked to speak but had declined, saying that he was unable to come and if he had been he was not sure what he would have said. They do a run-through of the play which is excellent, much better than I could have expected, and I begin to wonder whether it might amount to something.
20 September. John Fortune was once in a TV show with Irene Handl. It involved colour separation, a technique then in its infancy, and the enthusiastic young director thought he should explain the process to Miss Handl at the outset.
Swathed in a fur tippet and carrying at least two Pekingese, the dumpy old lady listened patiently while he embarked on a lecture about electronics. Eventually she interrupts: ‘Excuse me, dear, but I think you’re confusing me with one of those actresses who gives a fuck.’
I October, Telephoned by the Evening News to see if I have any comment to offer on the occasion of Harold Pinter’s fiftieth birthday. I don’t; it’s only later I realize I could have suggested two minutes’ silence.
10 October. Enjoy now in its second week at Richmond. See it tonight, after four days’ absence, and find it has turned into A Girl in My Soup, with the actors hopping from laugh to laugh with no thought for what’s in between. Several people, including Tom Sutcliffe in the Guardian, describe the play as ‘courageous’. Since the central character is in drag throughout, this presupposes that I spend my evenings idly running my fingers along a rack of strapless evening-gowns and adjusting my slingbacks. Now it can be told.
Next week a bad week for the play to open, as there are new plays opening practically every night, including one at the National by Howard Brenton, The Romans in Britain.
19 October. About the only person feeling more sorry for themselves than I am this Sunday morning must be Lady Barnett. She was convicted of shoplifting last Wednesday and I was convicted the same day, though of what? I don’t quite know, since I haven’t read the papers. But sentence was pronounced again today, this time unanimously; it will be carried out, and Enjoy close, in about three weeks ‘time.’ You have cut the umbilical cord,’ says Lindsay A.
A ring at the door yesterday. A telegram from In Britain, a magazine for tourists. ‘Feel you are the ideal person to interview Jonathan Miller. Reply prepaid.’
Reply, ‘Sorry, already interviewing him for Racing Pigeon Gazette.’
17 November, New York. Shepherd R., K.’s lawyer, calls and asks me if I would care for a theatrical experience around seven. Lynn prophesies it will be something to do with AA, and so it proves. A church hall off Hudson Street, used by various community groups. Notices to do with the aged. The times of the crèche. A poster,’ Blossom where you are planted.’ Three speakers at a table, miked: a drama teacher at Rutgers and part-time theatre critic of the Village Voice; Alice, the chairperson; and Tom, a priest (although you would not guess it – actually, maybe God would not guess it either). The room fills up, sexes about equally divided, more whites than blacks, one of the blacks a policeman in uniform. The most noticeable factor is that everybody smokes (and smokes and smokes), each chair with its individual tin–can ashtray.
A cadaverous white-haired woman stands up. ‘My name is Barbara and I am an alcoholic’
‘Hi, Barbara,’ everyone says.
Then Barbara recounts her experiences (while smoking): the blackouts, the pneumonia, the sickness.
The priest tells his story: how he got so pie-eyed at the Eucharist the congregation were lucky they got the wafer in their mouth, because generally they got it in the ear or even the eye.
One by one the people from the floor stand up and identify themselves.
‘My name is Marvin and I am an alcoholic.’
‘Hi, Marvin.’
‘My name is Todd and I am an alcoholic.’
‘Hi, Todd.’
Shepherd speaks too, and now there are so few people who haven’t testified that I begin to feel distinctly out of it and note some kind, encouraging smiles willing me to take the plunge. (‘My name is Alan and I’m English and I don’t do this sort of thing.’)
I’m saved by Alice, who, whenever there is a pause, gets hold of the mike and lets us in on her life. Alice’s big problem is not that she’s an alcoholic but that she’s a bore. Maybe that’s what drove her to drink, because as sure as hell it drives other people, a big guy in the front row falling fast asleep as she recounts her non-experiences when pissed. A lesson here, though, because whereas avowals of general degradation, such as Alice goes in for, are tedious, bad behaviour that is specific (e.g. the wafer in the ear) is interesting and funny.
Still, as so often with Americans, one comes away thinking that they do this kind of thing so much better than we do, and that, wanting irony, they show each other more concern.
11 December, New York. I am having supper at The Odeon when word goes round the tables that John Lennon has been shot. ‘This country of ours,’ sighs my waiter. ‘May I tell you the specials for this evening?’
The Chinese cooks come and stand at the door of the kitchen as a radio is brought to one of the booths. At another table some diners call instantly for their check, hardly bothering to conceal their appetite for the tragedy (they are, after all, New Yorkers), and take a cab uptown to join what WNEW is already calling ‘a vigil’. ‘Would you describe the crowd outside the Dakota Apartments as a vigil?’ asks Dan, our host. ‘I would describe it’, says the woman reporter, whose name is Robin, ‘definitely as a vigil.’
In England this will mark New York down yet again as a violent and dangerous place, but I walk back up West Broadway, the street deserted except for a few drunks in doorways (‘The slayer thought to be male, white’) and feel perfectly safe. Already, though, there are candles burning in windows, and a girl weeps as she waits on this warm, windy night to cross Canal Street – ‘Sixty-four degrees here on WNEW, the wind from the south-west’, the wind and the warmth making it possible for the male, white slayer to wait however long he had to wait this unseasonable December night for the return of his victim.
Back in my building all is normal, which is to say that Rose is shouting up the stairs at the top of her eighty-two-year-old voice. ‘My brain hurts,’ she is bellowing. ‘I’m a sick girl. Come on down here, you no-good four-eyed bastard. I’ll kill you dead. Bouncing your goddamn ball – that ain’t nice.’ This ball, which she has been complaining about for twenty years, does not exist except as
a sound in her own head, and, so far from sending her mad, her shouting about it has put the woman upstairs in Bellevue, so there is nobody in the apartment to bounce a ball anyway.
In England, where eccentricity is more narrowly circum-scribed, Rose would have been long ago in hospital herself; but here in New York, where everyone is mad, she is tolerated, looked after as maybe the male, white slayer has been tolerated and looked after. She stands at the door of her apartment:
‘She’s no good, my dear fellow. She stinks. Bring my clothes to the Bendix tomorrow. It’s a bad world, my dear.’
Meanwhile on WNEW, ‘We’re kind of staying together, keeping each other company through the night and just charting impressions here.’ ‘I guess’, says Dan, ‘that it’s kind of futile to speculate on the motives of the screwball who committed this murder, or maybe I should say the alleged screwball who committed this alleged murder.’ The body is now no longer believed to be at the Roosevelt Hospital and Yoko is thought to be back at the Dakota in ‘what is believed to be a deeply distraught condition.’ ‘Which is’, says Dan, ‘kind of surreal.’
‘Yeah,’ says another reporter (also charting impressions). ‘This night has much irony – irony that’s added to if we remember that showing on TV this evening was The Glenn Miller Story.’
‘I’d like to say’, says a caller, ‘that he had a zest for life. That’s what I’d like to say as of this moment.’
‘I don’t want to take away from the gravity of this situation,’ says another caller. ‘If anything I’d like to add to it, and what I would say is that it’s going to be hard to walk the streets of this town knowing he is not here with us. I once saw him on Madison Avenue.’
‘Hold on, people,’ says Dan. ‘We’re here. Hold on.’
1981
1 February. ‘What is it’, said Ariel C. today, ‘that I’ve no need to do now that I’m an old lady? ‘Oh, I remember: tell the truth.’
She has just seen the National’s production of The Caretaker, which she hasn’t liked because she didn’t care for Warren Hastings. She means Warren Mitchell, and when the mistake is pointed out says airily (and Arielly), ‘Well, he’s the only Warren I’ve come across.’
24 February. Supper at Pat Heald’s with Thora Hird, who tells stories of her childhood in Morecambe, where her father was the manager of the Winter Gardens. Morecambe had one prostitute, Nellie Hodge, who used to take her clients down the ginnel at the back of the Hirds’ house, thus providing Thora with a fund of anecdote.
CLIENT: Nay, put a bit of feeling into it, Nellie.
NELLIE: I can’t while I’m eating my fish and two. And on another occasion:
CLIENT: Nay, Nellie, don’t keep nodding your head.
NELLIE: I can’t help it, you’ve gone and got my scarf fast inside.
Thora has just had both hips replaced by Mr Brian Roper, a handsome, taciturn surgeon whom she teased. When he was looking at her scars, she said, ‘I suppose you’ve seen a lot of actresses’ bottoms, Mr Roper.’
‘I have, yes, Miss Hird.’
‘Tell me, do character actresses’ bottoms look any different from leading ladies‘?’
He thought for a moment.
‘No, Miss Hird. I don’t think they do.’
14 May. ‘Utter trust,’ says Miss Shepherd this morning. ‘I have utter trust. Look at you. I had utter trust when you were ill and you have recovered. More or less. Utter trust.’ And she bangs her fist on her knee.
Not getting the gist, I change the subject. ‘Have you heard about the Pope?’
‘I’m talking about the Pope. Your trouble was in the stomach, and that’s where he’s been shot. Utter trust.’
23 May. Each time I come to New York I’m surprised that Rose is still around. Having arrived last night, I wake this morning to hear her singing, and in due course there is a thud on the door. ‘Open!’ she shouts.
Rose never rings the bell, just hurls herself at the door expecting it to be open, as her door always is. Look through the spyhole and there is nobody there, Rose coming well below security level.
Though I’ve not been here for six months, there are no preliminaries. ‘I’m telling her, come on down, the dirty, nasty bitch. Bouncing a ball. It ain’t nice. I’m a sick girl, I tell you. Come on!’
She stands shouting up the staircase, looking like Old Mother Riley girding herself for battle. ‘I’ll kill you dead, I tell you.’
At which point one of the other tenants comes slowly down the stairs. He smiles wearily at me (Rose a burden all the tenants share).
‘Good morning, Rose.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, go ahead,’ and he passes through. ‘Come on down here, you bum. I’ll fix you.’
Then, the other tenant now out of earshot, ‘He’s no good, my dear fellow. He stinks. He’s had no luck with his sons. They’re all crazy.’
Dependent on everyone’s goodwill, Rose badmouths everybody and hasn’t a scrap of loyalty.
‘How are you, Blackie? Where’s Peetie?’
‘He’s not here.’
‘Ain’t that a shame? That ain’t nice. He’s a bum.’
‘He’s OK.’
‘Well, maybe he is. I don’t know. You’re nice to him; he’s nice to you. One hand washes the other in this world.’
She gives the empty staircase a final shout before going inside. ‘You come on down, you four-eyed bastard. I’ll kill you dead.
‘I can’t see so good now, Blackie. Bring my clothes to the Bendix, will you?’
12 June. Drive down to Shipbourne for George F.’s father’s funeral. It’s a warm, misty day, almost foggy, and Kent, which I seldom see except en route for Dover, is rich and lush. I know many of the place-names – East Hoathly, Ightham, Wrotham – from Denton Welch’s Journals, which I read when I was seventeen, the countryside still set in my mind as it was in those days, with barbed wire, Nissen huts and soldiers bathing.
George’s father was sixty-eight and had a stroke last month while I was in UCH, and it converted him into the same helpless, chained creature that lay in the bed opposite me. I’m thankful George hadn’t visited me and seen to what his dad might have come – a helpless hulk, rolling his eyes, grunting and roaring and trying to make himself understood. A second stroke finished him as (and today everyone keeps saying this) he would have wished.
Dick’s life had been full of odd coincidences. Wounded at Dunkirk, he was lying on the beach with the last boats gone, and as the Germans began to round up the remnants of the BEF he passed out. When he came to, he found himself looking up into the face of a German officer he knew: it was the man who had taught him German at school.
Having tried several times to escape, Dick ended up in Colditz, where he was Escape Officer after Pat Reid. Reid came to see him when he was dying, and took a turn at the bedside, sitting rigidly to attention while George went off and had a lie-down. George fell asleep, to be woken five hours later by a clap of thunder. Rushing back to the ward he found Reid sitting in exactly the same position, not having moved a muscle in five hours.
Dick died in Tunbridge Wells General Hospital, and all afternoon a drunken trumpeter was playing in the street outside – not, one would have thought, a common occurrence in Tunbridge Wells. As the afternoon drew to a close he signed off with the Last Post, shortly after which Dick died.
The village church is packed out. ‘Armoured Division or friend of the family?’ murmurs a ramrod figure on the door, and indeed half of the church is crammed with the men who won the war. Young officers then, now in their sixties, good, solid, old-fashioned faces, never wavering, never doubting, and singing their hearts out – ‘For All the Saints’, ‘Immortal, Invisible’. It’s like Forty Years On – all that one loves and hates.
The service over, the old soldiers turn and clap hands on familiar shoulders and there is a hum of talk as they troop out of the church, stilled suddenly as we see the family stood in a corner of the churchyard, gathered round the grave, people under the cedar trees w
atching.
2 July. McEnroe behaves badly at Wimbledon and in one particularly ludicrous moment shouts at a linesman, ‘You’re a disgrace to the human race.’ Some group captain on the high chair then docks him a point and an argument ensues as to whether McEnroe was, as he insists, talking to himself and, if he was, whether it was in order to talk to oneself on court (or even breathe).
Of course, now that Wimbledon is all about money, behaving badly is exactly what is required, certainly of McEnroe, and all the claptrap about decency and fair play is just the English at their usual game of trying to have it both ways. Wimbledon is now a spectacle, just as a wrestling match, say, is a spectacle, and a spectacle needs a Hero and a Villain. It’s a contest between Right and Wrong, not because McEnroe is particularly badly behaved but because the Wimbledon authorities have sold out to television and this kind of drama is just what viewers enjoy. So McEnroe doesn’t really have a choice, only a role.
Many of McEnroe’s critics point out how Connors has ‘reformed’: how three or four years ago he was the rogue, disputing calls, not attending the line-up, and how much better behaved he is now. This misses the point. Connors has to be better behaved, not because his character has changed or his tennis manners have improved but because he has no part in the spectacle. Or if he had (if he had beaten Borg in the semi-final for instance) he would have had to be cast in the Hero’s role.
All this is written at five in the morning. I seem to get these impulses to argue first thing – another bout a few days ago being on English philosophy, a subject of which I know and care as little as I do about tennis. But it isn’t just in the early morning. They go on all the time, these disputes with myself, and particularly when I’m cycling around. I catch passers-by looking at me, and it’s not out of recognition; seeing my frowning face and my jaw working away, they are thinking, ‘This is a lunatic.’