Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  When it came to giving offence, there too I kept finding that I had been if not timid, at least over-scrupulous. In the management and presentation of their newly acquired property of Stacpole House I imagined the Trust as entirely without inhibition, ready to exploit any aspect of the property’s recent history to draw in the public, wholly unembarrassed by the seedy or the disreputable. I envisaged a series of events I took to be wildly implausible, but in the light of recent developments they turn out to be almost tame.

  I read for instance that the audio guide to the National Trust house at Hughenden, once lived in by Disraeli, is voiced by Jeffrey Archer, euphemistically described by the Trust as ‘a provocative figure’. And in the matter of pornography the Trust has recently sponsored a tape to accompany a tour round London’s Soho, the highlights of which are not architectural. It is apparently selling very well.

  My objections to this level of marketing are not to do with morals but to do with taste. In another connection, though, and nothing to do with the Trust, I found life had outstripped my paltry imagination. I have no reference for this other than what the DNB used to call ‘personal knowledge’, but talking to someone about what I still thought of as the outrageousness of a country house being made the venue for a porn film, I was told that there was (and maybe still is) an entrepreneur who does just that, arranging similar (and equally chilly) filming in country houses north of the border.

  So, writing the play and imagining I was ahead of my times, I then found I was scarcely even abreast of them. Had the play not been produced when it was (in November 2012), in six months’ time it might have seemed hopelessly out of date.

  As is made plain in the play, Dorothy is not shocked by porn being filmed under her (leaking) roof. As she points out, she is a peeress in her own right. ‘The middle class … they’re the respectable ones.’ Which is a cliché but I’d have thought no less true for all that. But then, what do I know?

  My experience of high life is limited, but years ago, I think through George Melly, I used to be invited to parties given by Geoffrey Bennison, the fashionable interior decorator. He lived in Golden Square (‘Above Glorex Woollens, dear’) and there one would find Geoffrey in full drag, and very convincing drag it was, too, as he made no attempt to seem glamorous, instead coming across as a middle-aged duchess not unlike Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. It would be a very mixed bag of high life and low life – Diana Duff Cooper dancing with a well-known burglar sticks in the mind – respectability and the middle classes nowhere.

  ‘Now that I’m eighty there are two things I no longer have to do,’ said another grand lady of my acquaintance. ‘Tell the truth and wear knickers.’ What Dorothy is or is not wearing under her fur coat I don’t like to think.

  That said, I have never been entirely confident that the glimpses one is allowed in stately homes of the family’s ‘real life’ always ring true. Years ago I was filming at Penshurst Place, the home of Lord de L’Isle and Dudley, and I wrote in my diary (15 December 1984):

  The house is everything one imagines an English country house should be … a hotchpotch of different periods – mediaeval hall, eighteenth-century courtyards, Gothick front, solid green walls of yew and parterres of box. We film in a gallery adjoining the drawing room, part of the private wing, with photographs of Lord D. at Cambridge, in India as a young man and ADC to Wavell and now standing beside Macmillan as he unveils a plaque to Lord Gort. On a coffee table are back numbers of the Economist, Country Life and the TLS with drinks on the side.

  ‘Ah,’ one thinks. ‘A glimpse here of the private life.’ But is it? Is this really a private room or just a private room for public consumption? These drinks (and the bottle of vitamin pills beside them), have they been artfully arranged to suggest a private life? Is there somewhere else, another flat which is more private? And so on. And so on. The impression is confirmed by the hall table, on which are all the Viscount’s hats: his green Guards trilbies, his bowler, his lumberjack’s hat that was plainly presented to him on some sort of ceremonial visit. Surely, all this is meant to be seen?

  (Writing Home)

  No soiled underwear in the state bedroom at least … but even voicing the thought I can see it coming one day soon. The links between such unworthy musings and what happens in the play are obvious.

  Plays have buds, points at which something is mentioned in one play though not dwelt on but which turns up in a later play. Never sure of the significance of what one writes or the continuity of one’s concerns, I find these recurrences reassuring as pointing if nothing else to consistency. They can, though, be shaming.

  In The History Boys Irwin is a dynamic supply teacher who ends up as a TV historian and government special adviser. Televised in the latrine passage below the reredorter at Rievaulx Abbey, he speculates on those scraps of cloth on which the monks wiped their bums, some of which have been recovered and are in the abbey museum. Could it be shown that one of these fragments had actually been used by St Aelred of Rievaulx, would that scrap of cloth, Irwin wonders, then constitute a sacred relic? It’s an unsavoury preoccupation, but unnoticed by me a related concept has smuggled itself into People, where the notion of historical and celebrity urine is a branch grown from Irwin’s bud.

  On a different level the discussion of the Holocaust in The History Boys relates to Hector’s dismay that Auschwitz has become just another station on the tourist trail, with Hector concerned about the proportion of reverence to prurience among the visitors. This recurs – and to my mind more harshly – in People, with Lumsden’s comment that there is ‘nowhere that is not visitable. That at least the Holocaust has taught us.’

  Dorothy’s comments about the graffiti done by the Canadian troops billeted in the house during the war echo similar speculations in James Lees-Milne’s Ancestral Voices:

  Wednesday 7 January 1942. [At Brocket] I walked across a stile and down a footpath to the James Paine bridge, which the Canadian troops have disfigured by cutting their names, with addresses in Canada, and personal numbers, all complete and inches deep – the vandals. Yet, I thought, what an interesting memorial this will be in years to come and quite traditional, like the German mercenaries’ names scrawled in 1530 on the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino.

  He might have added the Viking inscriptions cut centuries earlier into the lions outside the Arsenale in Venice.

  It was in Lees-Milne, too, that I read about the Jungman sisters, who in their youth were Bright Young Things and contemporaries of Evelyn Waugh. In later life they turned reclusive, stockpiled the newspaper (the Telegraph, I suspect), reading one a day still but years behind the times.

  It has been said (by Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian) that nowadays ‘it is the demotic and the diurnal that matter to us when thinking about the past’ and what are generally called ‘bygones’ make a brief appearance in the play, as they regularly do in the below-stairs rooms of country houses. Fortunate in having had a relatively long life, I have grown used to seeing everyday items from my childhood featuring in folk museums or even as items on The Antiques Road-show, a brass and pewter gill measure from a milk pail, for instance (wielded at the Bennett family back door by the milkman, Mr Keen, his horse and trap waiting in the street); a posser for the clothes wash and jelly moulds galore.

  Even so I was surprised this summer when going round Blickling to see a young man rapt in contemplation of a perfectly ordinary aluminium pan. Still, he was doubtless a dab hand at the computer, which I’m not, even though to me aluminium pans are commonplace. Other vintage items which were in common use when I was young would be:

  A wicker carpet beater.

  A wooden clothes horse.

  A tidy betty.

  A flat iron.

  Pottery eggs.

  Spats.

  Black lead.

  Virol.

  The danger of making such a list is that one will in due course figure on it.

  Curiously it was only when I’d finished the pl
ay that I realised I’d managed to avoid giving the house a name. I suppose it ought to be the family name and so Stacpoole, except that one proof of aristocracy is to subtly distinguish the name of the house from the name of its location. Thus in a minor snobbery Harewood, the home of the Lascelles family and their earldom, is pronounced Harwood, whereas the village of Harewood, its location near Leeds, is pronounced as it’s spelled, Harewood. So on a similar principle I’ve called the house Stacpole but it’s pronounced Stacpool.

  In the play Bevan sings the praises of solitude with his slogan ‘P-S-T … people spoil things.’ While Bevan hardly carries the moral burden of the play he has a point … and some authorial sympathy.

  I have tasted the pleasures of singularity myself, having been lucky enough to be in Westminster Abbey at midnight and virtually alone. As an ex-trustee I am permitted to visit the National Gallery after hours, and filming has meant that I have often been in well-loved places like Fountains Abbey almost on my own.

  So, while it is to be hoped that such privileged privacies are never marketed in the way Bevan and ‘The Concern’ would like, the heady delights of exclusion are these days touted commercially more and more and without apology.

  The notion that the eighties in England marked a turning point keeps recurring – a time when, as Dorothy is told, we ceased to take things for granted and self-interest and self-servingness took over. Some of this alteration in public life can be put down to the pushing back of the boundaries of the state as begun under Mrs Thatcher and pursued even more disastrously thereafter, though in regretting this (and not being able to be more specific about it) Dorothy in her fur coat and gym shoes is thought by her sister the archdeacon to be pitiably naive as perhaps I am, who feels much the same. The state has never frightened me. Why should it? It gave me my education (and in those days it was a gift); it saved my father’s life as it has on occasion saved mine by services we are now told have to be paid for.

  What is harder to put one’s finger on is the growth of surliness in public behaviour and the sour taste of public life. There has been a diminution of magnanimity in government both central and local, with the public finding itself rebranded as ‘customers’, supposedly to dignify our requirements but in effect to make us available for easier exploitation. The faith – which like most ideologies has only a tangential connection with reason – is that everything must make a profit and that there is nothing that cannot be bought and sold.

  These thoughts are so obvious that I hesitate to put them down, still less make them specific in the play. Dorothy is asking what is different about England, saying how she misses things being taken for granted. We were told in the eighties and pretty constantly since that we can’t afford to take anything for granted, whereas to my mind in a truly civilised state the more that can be taken for granted in terms of health, education, employment and welfare the better we are for it. Less and less are we a nation and more and more just a captive market to be exploited. ‘I hate it,’ says Dorothy, and she doesn’t just mean showing people round the house.

  A propos the closet with the ancient chamber pots: having finished the play, we went for a short holiday in Norfolk in the course of which we went round Felbrigg Hall, the family home of R. W. Ketton-Cremer, who willed it to the National Trust on his death in 1969. Ketton-Cremer was an historian and had a well-stocked Gothick library which, as distinct from other such rooms in country houses, was a place of work, as Ketton-Cremer produced many books. Set in the thickness of the wall behind a pivoting bookcase was a closet with, on a table, a chamber pot. It was, alas, empty.

  I end as I have ended the introductions to the previous five plays on which we’ve worked together with my heartfelt thanks to Nicholas Hytner. He brings to life what to me on the page often seems dull. I write plays; he turns them into theatre. His productions of the plays are always a pleasure to work on and he emboldens me in writing them. And it’s always fun. ‘Plays is work,’ said Ellen Terry. ‘No play about it.’ But then she never worked with Nicholas Hytner.

  Thanks too to another encourager, Dinah Wood, my editor at Faber, and of course to all the cast of the play and the staff of the National. To turn up every few years with a play and still find oneself welcome is a great pleasure. It has its moments though. When I went in on the first day of rehearsal for People someone at the stage door said, ‘Still hanging on then?’

  Foreword to The Coder Special Archive

  Having in 1952 got a place at university I was required by my college before taking up residence to do my two years’ National Service. Dreading National Service though I did, even I could see I wasn’t ready for university. School was Leeds Modern School, a state school where even though I was in the sixth form I was very young for my age and at seventeen it was a toss-up which would come first, puberty or the call-up. At eighteen I had never been in a pub or had a cigarette or a girlfriend. I was an innocent and if I was unsuited for university I was even more so for the army.

  However there was a lifeline. We all of us in the sixth form knew about the Russian course, a cushy number (as I learned to call it) available if one persisted to boys like me who had got O levels or A levels (School Certificate or Higher School Certificate as they were then.) When I came to registering I opted for the navy, a choice of service dictated in part by aesthetic considerations – I thought a coder’s uniform looked more becoming. At the same time at seventeen I saw the three services, navy, air force and army as approximating to, corresponding with, the class system – navy as upper class, air force as middle, the army as working. So putting down for the navy I knew I was being over-aspirational, and it was no surprise at all when I ended up in the army where I belonged.

  Some of my classmates did manage to get into the navy, though: one of my closest friends John Totterdill becoming a midshipman where he had, it seemed to me, an ideal life swanning around the Mediterranean as office-boy cum valet to Admiral Sir Philip Vian. My classmates John Scaife and Tony Cash both became coders so I knew it could be done. But not by me, and when my papers came and I found I hadn’t got into the navy I also found it was far from certain I was going to be able to do Russian. Certainly nobody seemed to have heard of the course at Pontefract Barracks where I did my basic training with the York and Lancaster Regiment. But though not by nature tenacious I persisted so that when at the end of six weeks most of my platoon were drafted into the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment for eventual transfer to Korea I kicked my heels at Pontefract with another would-be Russian course candidate, Thomas Pearce, both of us eventually ending up at Coulsdon where we embarked on our study of the Russian language.

  In memoirs that I’ve read by others on the course much has been made of how hard one had to work. While this was hardly true of the later stages it was certainly the case during those first six weeks at Coulsdon. This was when one was learning the alphabet and the basic grammar and coming to terms with the daily word lists that one had to master and on which one was tested at the end of each week.

  The pressure, though, was to some extent self-imposed. We knew that the course at Coulsdon would end in an examination, with the top twenty-five per cent going on to Cambridge. The prospect of Cambridge would have been incentive enough but what made it seem almost beyond imagining was that did we get into the top twenty-five per cent at Cambridge we would no longer have to wear uniform, do drill or bull our kit – all the irksome and sometimes humiliating burdens that had been visited upon us would fall away. No more guard duty or the threat of jankers or being put on a charge. One would be a person again not a soldier. No wonder we worked.

  I am told that I am by nature competitive but I have never since been in a situation where one had to compete so directly with one’s fellows and so relentlessly that it coloured sociability and almost ruled out friendship. This was certainly true of the first pre-university period of the course and continued for some time afterwards though less unremittingly – or maybe one just got used to it. Hanging over us was always t
he threat of being RTU’d – returned to one’s unit, in my case Pontefract. I can’t recall this ever happening to anybody however poorly they did in the weekly tests, but it was perhaps because existence was to some extent precarious that I remember it as in many ways the most idyllic period of my life, and much more so than university proper which came a year or two later.

  We were housed to begin with at Cecil Lodge in Newmarket from which we were bussed every morning to the course HQ in Salisbury Villas on Station Road in Cambridge. At the end of the first term the lucky ones were allocated a house in Newnham Terrace in the centre of Cambridge (and subsequently part of New Hall). The rest of us were relegated to Foxton Hall, a square lavatory-bricked villa just outside Cambridge on the main line to King’s Cross. Gone now, it was where I had my first gin and tonic and my first cigarette and used to stand on the lawn at dusk listening to the bats.

  Finally we were all reunited at Douglas House on Trumpington Road, both Foxton and Douglas House having an afterlife as convalescent homes before being demolished. If I dwell on these houses it’s because they rather than Salisbury Villas are what remain in the memory, so much so that walking up the road to the station a few weeks ago I couldn’t even pick out which villa it was where we’d studied half a century ago.

  After Cambridge it was back to uniform and six months at Bodmin, living in the Spider, a conglomeration of Nissen huts heated only by coke stoves. Morning parades were a shambles with pyjamas worn under uniforms the weather was so bitter and classrooms so cold. Again it’s the extra-curricular activities I remember most vividly – the poker fever that gripped the camp for a few months then ceased as abruptly as it had started; swimming at a surely insanitary waterhole on the moors followed by stupendous farmhouse teas at Mrs Penhaligon’s. Cornwall then was criss-crossed by railways so there were trips to Fowey and Lostwithiel with weekends spent at St Columb Minor and Polzeath, surfing yet to be discovered.