Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  The animals we have come to see are not much looked at either and blessedly form a small backwater off the slow-moving throng. What do I notice? Probably not much more than anyone else – a mosaic floor, divided into panels of various vegetables, one panel a bunch of asparagus, the thought as trivial as ‘They ate asparagus just as we do – and parcelled up in the same way.’ A hedgehog. Goats, always a touch sinister, horses gouged by lions, a huge and wonderful camel’s head, various boars – no domestic pets it occurs to me now writing this. Wandering to the end of the room where there is a view over the city I come round a corner on a nun, in uniform, gazing on a naked Venus.

  We have a chance to go on and out via the Sistine Chapel but the throng is too great so we turn about and thread our way back and out into the now quieter street, the earlier queue having evaporated.

  Best, so it’s said, to come in the afternoon when all the tours have gone.

  Lovely supper at the restaurant George F. recommended, the Da Fortunato, up a side street from the Pantheon. Decent, unpretentious, the food delicious, the waiters looking like dentists or professors of philosophy. At a table behind me a dozen or so Italian businessmen all in suits and eating a pre-ordered meal that looks tempting – whitebait, courgette flowers in batter, raspberries. In England they would have got rowdier as the meal went on; here they are genial and enjoying themselves but decorously so.

  In front of me a prosperous middle-aged man and his wife or girlfriend. They both have steak tartare followed by – steak tartare again.

  On the next table to them is an oldish man, white-haired with a fine, handsome face who looks like someone out of Cheever. Out of Cheever, too, in that he disposes of a whole bottle of white wine in the course of his meal (Jerusalem artichoke followed by grilled sole – the filleting of which he follows attentively and completes himself, carefully picking out any stray bones). He is entirely self-sufficient, taking no interest in anyone else dining and seems familiar to the staff. He could be an expatriate poet or, perhaps more likely, the distinguished retired head of a grand advertising agency – and it’s not merely that the hero of Roth’s Everyman is almost that – I fancy by the end of the meal he is quite drunk but our meal is over so I can’t stick around to see. There could be no sharper contrast with this man than the other Americans dining – half a dozen big and overweight tourists who sit in the centre of the room – altogether out of place in such a fastidious establishment, though the waiters give no sign of thinking so. Another not untypical figure is the old proprietor, dark-suited and looking like a businessman but whose function seems now to be reduced to straightening the odd chair – and even at one point a table, which he carefully manhandles out of the room. It’s a lovely meal, though, and we plan to go there again this evening, Saturday.

  13 May. We pack our bags ready for this afternoon’s plane then stroll along the street to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, passing on the way a covey of priests and earnest young laity en route for a prolife demonstration. I feel sorry for these devout and less than butch youths (me, once), knowing the priests look down on them, while longing for sterner converts.

  At first the palazzo seems closed and we have to circumambulate the whole building to find the entry door. This, though, is salutary, as it makes one realise what a vast place it is – virtually an entire city block and a small town in itself. The late Stuart Burge, the theatre director, was hidden here as an escaped POW in the war, which I took to mean he spent this perilous time in the bosom of the family. Stuart always played this down and now I can see why, as he may well have been lodged in some attic or vestibule of this vast complex, never setting eyes on the Doria-Pamphilj themselves. The museum itself is staggering, with rank on rank of paintings stretching from floor to ceiling so that when you look in a small side room and find the Velázquez Innocent X unheralded and on its own, it’s almost by accident. One blessing of the palazzo is that though every one of the rooms on show is lined with posh seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chairs, none of which is to be sat on, and the upholstery protected by nasty see-through plastic, there are always in addition three or four canvas and metal chairs, so one never goes far without somewhere one can sit down and take in the room, sightseeing thus becoming almost a pleasure.

  Security at Fiumicino seems quite relaxed, to the extent that one of the men on duty, a nice jolly fellow, makes jokes about it, saying (as he conducts the body search), ‘No bombs today then?’ and R. gets much the same treatment.

  Things have changed, at least in Italy. A few years ago a friend of ours in Canada made a joke about bombs as he was going through security and was promptly hauled off to a cell where he was stripsearched and kept there for several hours and when he was eventually released had some incriminating entry made on his computer record. Even allowing for my nervousness about flying I think I still prefer the Italian approach.

  23 May. A party for HMQ at the Royal Academy where around six we join a straggling queue of notables, the actors the most obvious, though Vivienne Westwood is her usual unobtrusive self. Talk to various people in the queue, one of whom seems to know my plays well but then congratulates me on my paintings of trees – she’s the first of three people who confuse me with Hockney and though he too is at the party I doubt if he is ever confused with me.

  Inside the place is less crowded than one had expected and with the rooms so tall it’s almost airy. We’re directed into one of the emptier rooms where HMQ is due to pass through but are then pounced on by some young man who asks if he may introduce the (slightly bewildered) Duke of Kent. We have an awkward few minutes but the day is saved by Clive Swift, whose son Joe has just won a medal at Chelsea. HRH knows about Chelsea and so brightens considerably. Meanwhile lurking by the door HMQ is due to come through is Kate O’Mara and, when I next look, lining up to meet Her Majesty are Ms O’Mara along with Joan Collins and Shirley Bassey, the impression being that anyone can get to speak to the monarch provided you’re pushy enough. But it’s all very casual, so much so that R. doesn’t even see the queen, though she’s distinctive enough, dressed in white and glittering with jewels, determinedly animated and smiling, which, since she’s been at it for two hours already, is an achievement in itself. We go on through the rooms, talking to all sorts of people – Jim Naughtie, Nigel Slater and David Hare, who claims that the best conjunction he’s seen so far is George Steiner talking to Joan Collins.

  Come away at eight o’clock with HMQ still at it, and the policemen in the forecourt very jolly and eating ice cream.

  24 May. A year or so ago and more I was a prize in a charity auction at the Roundhouse and drinks or whatever with me sold, I don’t know how much for, to Guy Chambers – the songwriter (for Robbie Williams) and pop promoter. Dates have been arranged four or five times and one or other of us has cancelled but this evening a car comes to take me up to Lambolle Road in Belsize Park for what I imagine is going to be some sort of cocktail party. But not at all. Guy C. and his wife Emma have got their mothers round and some friends and their wonderfully behaved children, there’s a big chair in the corner for me while they are on sofas or sitting on the floor from which they ask me questions about what I’ve written (particularly Lady in the Van). Though he’s obviously v. successful in a world of which I’ve no knowledge, the set-up is nicely childlike and I feel like a teacher in a primary school. I talk and answer questions from seven thirty or so till nine fifteen and it’s lovely and easy and no chore at all. I walk back over Primrose Hill, the evening hot still with couples strolling about the streets – a murmuring night with love in the air – the top of the hill busy and crowds outside the pub in a lively Regent’s Park Road.

  1 June. John Horder has died at ninety-two, who, after a succession of bad doctors at university and in New York, was the physician who restored my faith in the medical profession. It was partly because he listened, as doctors have learned to do since, I hope, but which in the early 1960s they hardly did at all. Kind and in some respects saintly, his care for h
is patients brought on regular breakdowns and he was no stranger to depression. Famous as Sylvia Plath’s doctor, he always reproached himself that he did not see her suicide coming. What he thought of Ted H. is not recorded. Once examining (as he was often called on to do) my back passage he said: ‘No. I can’t find anything that concerns me here but’ – his finger all the while up my bum – ‘it’s always nice to see you.’

  4 June. In Yorkshire it’s a lovely blustery blue day but in London the rain which soaked Sunday’s endless Jubilee regatta has had a more melancholy consequence, as when we get home we find by the back door two dead baby wrens, drowned presumably in the torrents that poured down on HMQ. One thinks of all that work – the parents flying in and out every five minutes – all gone to waste. Now, without them, the garden seems empty.

  19 June. Watch the last of Grayson Perry’s TV series In the Best Possible Taste, which have been good programmes, though requiring the subjects – tonight it’s the upper classes – to think about decoration and style, thus almost inevitably falsifying the answers, the unthinkingness of style of its essence. It put me in mind though of my second play, Getting On (1971), which I look up. It’s not a good play (and far too wordy) but where it scores – and is almost documentary – is about class and style, and particularly the style of the young marrieds who were my contemporaries in 1970, with George, the verbose Labour MP who’s its central figure, hankering after the style of the old middle classes, ‘the middle-class family … the most exclusive interior decorator in the world’. He also hankers after unselfconsciousness in style and taking things for granted which, forty years later, I’m still on about in People – not that anyone will notice.

  22 June. Funeral of my agent, Ros Chatto.

  A typical phone call from Ros would begin: ‘I don’t think we want to do this one, darling’ – and more often than not she was right.

  ‘It’s one of those e-mails, darling. It begins, “Hi Ros!” I’ve never met her in my life.’

  And though if one did the job it would at least have made her a little money, that never came into it and once the tiresome distraction of work was disposed of she could get down to the real business – gossip, what she was reading, what you were reading, what plays she’d seen, what plays you hadn’t seen – phone calls which came two or three times a week right until the finish with Ros refusing to recognise illness was anything other than a bore.

  It’s a small and unheralded sort of courage but courage nevertheless.

  I thought of Ros as my contemporary though she was a decade or so older and had memories of the theatre that went back to the time when Peter Brook still directed plays on Shaftesbury Avenue and she was always giving little sidelights on her life before that. In The History Boys a boy seduces a master and there was some tut-tutting that this was unlikely. ‘Nonsense,’ said Ros. ‘I seduced the art master when I was sixteen.’

  Other regular features would be excerpts from the collected wisdom of Robert Morley. ‘I’ve discovered the sovereign remedy for diabetes – meringues.’

  How one will miss her. It’s as if the whole landscape has altered.

  3 July. Feel I should register the continuing excellence of Radios 3 and 4 prompted by two and a half hours of reminiscences on Radio 3 by the ninety-year-old John Amis, which included him talking at length to Myra Hess (whose voice I’ve never heard before) and also to Walter Legge, both of whom were fascinating and with no indication in Amis’s voice that he himself is well past his sell-by date.

  Consistently good, too, is Last Word, the obituary programme on Radio 4, and The Archive Hour, which on 7 July was about Harold Macmillan – the Night of the Long Knives. This was terrific stuff both in itself, Macmillan always a treat even when he’s being a show-man, but also in pointing up the driving down of standards in politics that has occurred since. Taken together with Sue MacGregor’s The Reunion and Jim Naughtie’s New Elizabethans these half a dozen programmes are alone worth the licence fee.

  5 July. Speech at the Kentish Town Health Centre:

  We are here to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the foundation of the James Wigg practice. No one now, of course can remember James Wigg who began this practice in 1887 but there may still be one or two people who remember his son John Wigg who succeeded him and was in practice at the start of the National Health Service in 1948.

  Many of us, though, myself included will have fond memories of his first partner, John Horder who alas died two months ago at the age of ninety-two and whose widow and fellow practitioner Elizabeth is with us this afternoon.

  I don’t think any of them or any of the long succession of doctors who have worked at the James Wigg would be offended if I said that this has always been a practice that has served the poor and underprivileged.

  Though there are areas of Kentish Town that have come up in the world it is still a relatively deprived area and the doctors who practise here and all the staff, driven by a calling that is both social and therapeutic and that has been a feature of the James Wigg throughout its long history.

  Thinking of the period between the First and Second Wars which, in 1948, led to the foundation of the NHS, John Wigg said, ‘The resentment of the dreadful injustices experienced by my patients will never completely subside and I would rather choke than vote for the party which sponsored them. The deprivations were bad enough. What was so intolerable was the carefully nurtured suggestions that only the indolent were victims of the economic battle.’

  That was written in the late 1930s but it’s a view that still hangs about and is made an excuse for economies and so-called reforms that are no reforms at all. And the doctors in the practice today still find themselves battling for the rights of their patients often against marketing philosophies which have very little to do with their welfare.

  Still when we look round us at this health centre, achieved over the last decade not quite single-handedly but very much thanks to Roy McGregor and which, without his patience and boundless enthusiasm and energy would have been impossible, we can, as patients be grateful for what is both a centre of excellence and one of service.

  And though this is a very modern practice may the day never come when patients are referred to or thought of as customers. The word patient means a sufferer and when someone comes to the doctor they are coming not because they want to buy something but because they want help. Structure and restructure the Health Service how you will doctors are not shopkeepers, patients are not customers and medicine is not a product.

  Just as James Wigg back in 1887 went into general practice to alleviate the plight of the poor of Kentish Town so even in the vastly changed circumstances of today medicine at whatever level is still a calling and we should be grateful and proud that here in the James Wigg practice we have such a dedicated band of professionals: doctors, nurses, ancillary workers at all levels whose ideals are still those of its founder, James Wigg.

  14 July. Drive in the now almost daily rain up the M40 to turn off in Oxfordshire for Middleton Stoney and Rousham. The rain has stopped as we drive into the stables courtyard where there is a gathering of what look like grand gardeners drinking champagne out of plastic cups. Spotted by R. in a shapeless hat and raincoat one detaches himself and raising his glass comes over. It is Michael Wheeler-Booth – my contemporary at Oxford and a friend and pupil of Bruce McFarlane. Their group now adjourns to the summerhouse at the western end of the front lawn while R. and I occupy its easterly twin and have our sandwiches, their much more elaborate picnic – salads, sausages – taking time to set out. Meanwhile we do our tour of the garden which, despite the rain and the occasional muddy path, is otherwise immaculate – the rill or cascade, always my favourite, running clear and steady out of the pond in which there is one flowery-tailed tadpole, possibly a newt. The river is high and fast, flowing brown and dimpled almost up to its banks. Now the sun is coming out and in the reeds are dozens of blue and black (mayflies(?). This is the third or fourth time I’ve been to Rousham but it
has never before seemed so appealing. The kitchen garden in particular is a riot of colour, its plump cottage garden borders showing no sign of the months of rain we’ve had, the beds in the rose garden full of tall self-sown maroon poppies. Back at the summerhouse they are well into their lunch which the ladies urge us to share while the men ply the drink. I talk to a retired history don from Oriel, Jeremy Catto, friend and disciple of Trevor-Roper who as regius professor had been attached to Oriel without liking the college one bit. Nice and easy to talk to though my nervousness of dons is never entirely dispelled, however chatty they are. One sad bit of news he tells me is that Maurice Keen is now in a home in Banbury suffering from dementia. I have not seen Maurice Keen in sixty years but this does not make it less melancholy.

  31 July. Shopping in Primrose Hill this afternoon I see David Miliband on the phone outside the bookshop. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the election (and his demotion) so I wave and he straight away comes off the phone and we talk. I’m not even sure if he still lives in Edis Street (which he does) but that apart he talks entirely about me – where do I live now, what am I reading, have I got a new play on but in that kind of half-attentive way politicians have, asking questions but scarcely listening to the answers – royalty, I imagine, similarly.