Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  The offices too have not been touched, a ledger open on a desk, records and files still on the shelves. In a locker are a cardigan and three polystyrene plates, remnants of a last takeaway, and taped to the door a yellowing cyclostyled letter dated 12 June 1977. It is from a Mr Goff, evidently an executive of the firm, living at The Langdales, Kings Grove, Bingley. Mr Goff has been awarded the OBE in the Jubilee Honours, and in the letter he expresses the hope ‘that the People, who are the Main Prop in any endeavour, many with great skill and ability, will take Justification and Pride in it and will’, he earnestly hopes, ‘feel that they will be sharing in the Honour conferred on me.’

  11 July, Downs, Coulter & Co., Currer Street, Bradford. Another empty factory, which we fit out as the office and medical room of a dyeworks. The firm has moved to new premises in Thornton but still on the wall is a list of internal telephone numbers: Mr Jack, Mr Ben, Mr Jim, Mr Luke. It is evidently a family firm, and sounds straight out of The Crowthers of Bankdam. Also on the wall is an advertising calendar sent out by Chas Walker & Sons, Beta Works, Leeds, and headed Textile Town Holidays 1974. From big cities like Leeds and Manchester down to the smallest woollen and cotton towns like Tottingham and Clayton-le-Moors, the calendar lists the different fortnights in the summer the mills would close down. If they hadn’t closed down for good already, that is. The artwork is a fanciful drawing of a toreador watched by elegant couples under Martini umbrellas but the obstinate echoes are of men in braces sat in deck-chairs, fat ladies paddling at Bridlington and Flambor-ough and Whitley Bay. For most of them now one long holiday.

  16 July, Bradford. A boy of sixteen, hair streaked and dressed in the fashion, leads an old lady down Bridge Street. In this town of the unemployed he is probably her home help or on some community-care scheme so it’s not just the spectacle of youthful goodness that makes it touching. But, not yet of an age to go arm in arm, he is leading her by the hand. He little more than a child, she a little less, they go hand in hand along Hall Ings in the morning sunshine.

  Night Shoot, Little Germany. In the original script the first scene was set in the doctor’s surgery in Prague at the end of the war. Old Franz is let in and mentions there is a body hanging from the lamp-post outside. Richard Eyre thought that a more arresting opening would be of Franz picking his way down the bombed street and the man’s body hanging in the foreground.

  The corpse is played by an extra, who is perhaps sixty. It is a complicated shot, done at night, and involves water flooding down the street, the camera on a crane, and high above it another much taller crane, a ‘cherry-picker’, from which (since the lamp-post is false) the ‘corpse’ has to be suspended. There is no dialogue and nothing for me to do. It’s too dark to read and too cold to be standing about. We have done the first shot when I notice that a placard has been hung round the corpse’s neck saying TRAITOR. I think this is too specific and ask Richard if we can do a shot without it. There are other technical problems to be sorted out before we do a second take, and those not involved hang around chatting and drinking coffee. As so often on a film, the atmosphere is one of boredom and resignation, troops waiting for the action. Or the ‘Action’.

  Suddenly there is a commotion at the lamp-post. The hanging man has been sick, is unconscious. There is a rush to get him down, many hands reaching up, the scene, in our carefully contrived light and shade, like a Descent from the Cross. Thankful at last to have something to do, the duty policeman briskly calls up an ambulance while the make-up girls (odd that this is part of their function) chafe the man’s feet. At first it is feared that he has had a heart attack, but soon he is sitting up. We abandon the shot, and Mervyn, the production manager, calls a wrap. The water is turned off, props begin to clear the rubble from the street as an ambulance arrives and the patient gets in under his own steam. There is some discussion whether anyone from the unit should go with him, as someone undoubtedly should. But it is 3.30 a.m. and he goes off in the ambulance alone. I note my own reluctance to assume this responsibility. I could have gone, though there is no reason why I should. Except that it’s my play. I’m to blame for him hanging there in the first place.

  (Though it seems fairly obvious to me, in the finished film the meaning of this hanged man puzzles some people. The doctor had heard the man running down the street the previous night, trying to find a refuge from his pursuers. He bangs on a door and it is opened – by his pursuers. His refuge turns out to be his doom. This kind of paradox is one associated with Kafka, and it’s also the paradox at the heart of the play: Kafka does Franz a favour by giving him a job in his factory, but since the factory turns out to make asbestos this good turn leads in the end to Franz’s death.)

  17 July, Peckover Street, Little Germany. Dan Day-Lewis, who plays Kafka, has a stooping, stiff-necked walk which I take to be part of his characterization. It’s certainly suited to the role, and may be derived from the exact physical description of Kafka given by Gustav Janouch. Even so, I’m not sure if the walk is Kafka or Dan, since he’s so conscientious he seldom comes out of character between takes and I never see him walking otherwise.

  We film the scenes between Kafka and his father (Dave King), the Kafka family home set up on another floor of the same empty warehouse. When I first worked on the script with Richard Eyre he wondered whether these scenes of the Kafka household were necessary, feeling that the film is really the story of Franz, to which Kafka is only incidental. I pressed for them then, the producer Innes Lloyd agreed, so here we are in the Kafka apartment. Any doubts are resolved by a scene in which Hermann Kafka gets into his son’s bed, then stands on it (an image taken from one of Kafka’s stories) and begins to bounce up and down, the sound that of the sexual intercourse Kafka could often hear from his parents’ bedroom when he was struggling to write.

  (Richard’s instinct proves right, nevertheless: in the editing the scene is cut, as it seems to hold up the story.)

  The Bradford sequences over, we now have three days off before moving to Liverpool.

  23 July, Fruit Exchange, Victoria Street, Liverpool. This is a great rarity: a location that exactly matches the scene as I imagined it. A small, steeply raked auditorium with a gallery done in light oak and lit by five leaded windows. It was built in 1900 and is as pleasing and nicely proportioned as a Renaissance theatre. Each seat is numbered, the numbers carved in a wood that matches the pews, and facing them a podium on which is the hydraulic lift that brought up the produce to be auctioned. Ben Whitrow stands on the podium now as we wait to rehearse a scene in which, as a professor of medicine, he uses Franz in a clinical demonstration for his students. The students are played by fifty Liverpool boys, some of whom are given lines to speak. (‘What is this word?’ asks one. ‘Origin.’ ‘What does that mean?’)

  One is tempted to think that this auditorium and another that adjoins it should be rehabilitated and used as theatres. For revues possibly. Seeing it for the first time Vivian Pickles remarks, ‘Look out! I feel a song coming on.’ Yet if it was a theatre it would straightaway lose its charm, part of which lies in its being unwanted, a find. We do our little bit to hasten its decline by cutting out one section of the pews to accommodate a gallery. Pledged to restore it to its original state, our carpenters will patch it up but it will never be quite the same.

  In the scene, Robert Hines, who plays Franz, has to stand naked on the podium under the bored eyes of fifty medical students. As the day wears on the extras have no problem simulating boredom, often having to be woken for the take. I never fail to be impressed by the bravery of actors. Robert is a striking and elegant figure, seemingly unselfconscious about his nakedness. Did I have to display myself in front of a total stranger, let alone fifty of them, my part would shrink to the size of an acorn. Robert’s remains unaffected. I mention this to John Pritchard, the sound supervisor. ‘I see,’ he says drily. ‘You subscribe to the theory of the penis as seaweed.’ It later transpires that Robert’s seeming equanimity has been achieved only after drinking a whole bott
le of wine.

  24 July, St George’s Hall, Liverpool. We film a long and complicated shot that introduces the Workers Accident Insurance Institute, the office where Kafka worked for most of his life. I had written this shot in several scenes, but Richard Eyre combines them into one five-minute tracking shot. An office girl is making her rounds, collecting on behalf of the retiring head of department. The camera goes with her as she moves from office to office, calling in turn on the three clerks who figure in the story, finally ending up in Kafka’s office, where he is dictating to his secretary.

  The WAII office has been built in the St George’s Hall, the massive municipal temple on the Plateau at the heart of Liverpool. Ranged round the vast hall are statues of worthies from the great days of the city, and on the floor a rich and elaborate mosaic, set with biblical homilies. ‘By thee kings reign and princes decree justice,’ say the roundels on the floor. ‘Save the NHS. Keep Contractors Out,’ say other roundels, badges stuck there at a recent People’s Festival. ‘He hath given me skill that He might be honoured,’ says the floor. ‘Save the pits,’ say the stickers. It is a palimpsest of our industrial history. Peel and George Stephenson look down.

  Most of the unit are staying in the Adelphi, a once grand hotel and the setting of the thirties comedy Grand National Night. More recently the vast lounge figured in the television version of Brideshead Revisited as the interior of a transatlantic liner. One gets a hint of its former grandeur in the size of the towels, but the service is not what it was. At breakfast I ask for some brown toast. The waiter, a boy of about sixteen and thin as a Cruikshank cartoon, hesitates for a moment then slopes over to the breakfast bar and riffles through a basket of toast. Eventually he returns with two darkish pieces of white toast. ‘Are these brown enough?’ It is not a joke.

  26 July, St George’s Hall. At the centre of the gilded grilles on the huge doors of the St George’s Hall is the motto SPQL – the senate and people of Liverpool. There isn’t a senate now and the building serves no civic function, the courts, which once it housed, transferred to less noble concrete premises down the hill. As for the people, they occasionally figure at rallies and suchlike, and marches seem to begin here, but the portico stinks of urine and grass grows on the steps.

  In front of the St George’s Hall is a war memorial, a stone of remembrance inlaid with bronze reliefs. The inscription read: OUT THE NORTH PARTS A GREAT COMPANY AND A MIGHTY ARMY. The panels, soldiers on one side, civilians on the other, are vaguely Vorticist in inspiration, the figures formal and angular and all inclined at the same slant. It was designed by Professor Lionel Budden of Liverpool University, and the bronze reliefs done by H. Tyson Smith. These aren’t notable names but it is a noble thing, far more so than Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph.

  Behind the war memorial one looks across the Plateau to the Waterloo Monument and a perfect group of nineteenth-century buildings: the Library, the Walker Art Gallery and the Court of Sessions. Turn a little further and the vista is ruined by the new TGWU building, which looks like a G-Plan chest of drawers. A blow from the left. Look the other way and there’s a slap from the right – the even more awful St John’s Centre. Capitalism and ideology combine to ruin a majestic city.

  Tony Haygarth plays Pohlmann, the kindly clerk in Kafka’s office. In his period suit he is hanging about the steps at lunchtime, wanting company. ‘I’d like to go over to the pub, you see, but in this outfit I’d feel a bit left-handed.’

  28 July, Cunard Building. Kafka was once standing outside the Workers Accident Insurance Institute watching the claimants going in. ‘How modest these people are,’ he remarked to Max Brod. ‘Instead of storming the building and smashing everything to bits they come to us and plead.’ We film that scene today, with the injured workers thronging up the steps. Most of them are made up to look disabled, but a couple of them genuinely are – a fair young man with one arm who plays one of the commissionaires and a boy with one leg and a squashed ear who, like the lame boy in the Pied Piper, comes limping along at the tail of the crowd. Without regarding the disabled as a joke, I have put jokes on the subject into the script. ‘Just because you’ve got one leg’, shouts an official, ‘doesn’t mean you can behave like a wild beast.’ Though the intention is to emphasize the heartlessness of the officials and the desperation of the injured workpeople, the presence of these genuine cripples shows one up as equally heartless. I can’t imagine, have not tried to imagine, what it is like to have a limb torn off or have half an ear. ‘You say you understand,’ says Franz in the film, ‘But if you do and you do nothing about it then you’re worse than the others. You’re evil.’ This is an echo of Kafka’s own remark that to write is to do the devil’s work. And to say that it is the devil’s work does not excuse it. One glibly despises the photographer who zooms in on the starving child or the dying soldier without offering help. Writing is not different.

  28 July. It is nine o’clock and still light, and I go looking for a restaurant to have my supper. I walk through the terrible St John’s Centre. It has a restaurant, set on a concrete pole (may the architect rot); now empty, it boasts a tattered notice three hundred feet up advertising to passing seagulls that it is TO LET. I pass three children, the eldest about twelve. They are working on a shop window which has CLOSING DOWN painted on it. Spelling obviously not their strong point, they are standing back from it puzzling how they can turn it into an obscenity when I pass with my book. The book takes their eye and there’s a bit of ‘Look at him. He’s got a book.’ ‘What’s your book?’ I walk on and find myself in an empty precinct. The children have stopped taunting and seem to have disappeared. I look round and find that the trio are silently keeping pace with me. In an utterly empty square they are no more than three feet away. I am suddenly alarmed, stop, and turn back to where there are more people. I have never done that before in England, and not even in New York.

  30 July, St George’s Hall. Bob the gaffer is giving one of the sparks directions over a faulty lamp. ‘Kill it before you strike it,’ he says. It is a remark that could be called Kafkaesque did not the briefest acquaintance with the character of Kafka discourage one from using the word. But he lives, and goes by public transport – at a bus-stop today the graffiti: hope is FUCKING HOPELESS.

  31 July, St George’s Hall. Happy to be drawing towards the end of the shoot, I have come to dislike Liverpool. Robert Ross said that Dorsetshire rustics, after Hardy, had the insolence of the artist’s model, and so it is with Liverpudlians. They have figured in too many plays and have a cockiness that comes from being told too often that they and their city are special. The accent doesn’t help. There is a rising inflection in it, particularly at the end of a sentence, that gives even the most formal exchange a built-in air of grievance. They all have the chat, and it laces every casual encounter, everybody wanting to do you their little verbal dance. One such is going on at hotel reception tonight as I wait for my key. ‘You don’t know me,’ says a drunken young man to the receptionist, ‘but I’m a penniless millionaire.’ You don’t know me, but I’m a fifty-one-year-old playwright anxious to get to my bed.

  1 August, Examination Schools, University of Liverpool. In St George’s Hall we had been insulated against noise. The vastness of the building meant that even a violent thunderstorm did not interrupt filming, the only problem the muffling of its huge echo. This final location is different. Outside three roads meet, and the bus station is nearby, so that traffic makes filming almost impossible. As chairman of the tribunal, Geoffrey Palmer has a long, passionate speech, his only scene in the film. Traffic noise means that we go for take after take before we get one that the sound department thinks is even passable. Then, between buses, we re-record the scene sentence by sentence, sometimes even phrase by phrase. It is an actor’s nightmare, as all feeling has to be sacrificed to achieve consistency of tone. Entitled to get cross, Geoffrey remains good-humoured and in complete control, and when the speech is edited there is no hint of the conditions under which it was recorded
. A splendid actor with an absolutely deadpan face, he is an English Walter Matthau.

  5 August, The guard, an elderly and distinguished-looking West Indian, announces over the Tannoy that this is the 16.45 from Leeds to Kings Cross, the estimated time of arrival 19.15. He adds, ‘May the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you and keep you always if you will let him. Thank you.’ Nobody smiles.

  9 August, London. Dr Macgregor sends me for an X-ray to University College Hospital, and I go down to Gower Street to make the appointment. I stand at the Enquiry Desk while the plump, unsmiling receptionist elaborately finishes what she is doing before turning her attention to me.

  ‘Yes?’ She glances at my form. ‘Second floor.’

  I long to drag her across the counter and shake her till her dentures drop out. ‘Listen,’ I want to say, ‘you are as essential to the well-being of this hospital as its most exalted consultant. You can do more for the spirits of patients coming to this institution than the most skilful surgeon. Just by being nice. Be nice, you cow.’

  I sit upstairs waiting for the next receptionist and realize that this is what we have been acting out, playing at, these last two weeks in Liverpool. Here I am with my form, queuing with my docket in UCH in 1985 as we have filmed the claimants queuing with theirs in Prague in 1910. I note that even when we were filming and playing at bureaucracy we fell into its traps. I never had much to do with the extras for instance. I mixed with the actors, who were known to me and who played the officials, the named parts, but kept my distance from the throng of claimants, none of whose names or faces I knew. Indeed I resented them just as the real-life officials must have done, and for the same reasons: they crowded the place out, mobbed the coffee urn, and generally made life difficult. Well, I reflect, now I am punished.