The Complete Talking Heads

by Alan Bennett

  Pause.

  I keep wondering about my Dad.

  GO TO BLACK.

  Up on a jug and tumbler on the bedside table.

  BLACK.

  Up again on Miss Schofield in bed. Her hair should be straight, as if it has been washed but not set. The speeches are more disjointed, and feebler.

  I’m lucky. I’m standard size. I’ve got stuff off the peg and people have thought I’d had it run up specially. I’ve got a little fawn coat hanging up at home that I got fifteen years ago at Richard Shops. I ring the changes with scarves and gloves and whatnot, but it’s been a grand little coat.

  Pause.

  I fetched up ever such a lot of phlegm this morning. Nurse Gillis was on. She was pleased. She said I’d fetched up more phlegm than anyone else on the ward. I said ‘Was there a prize?’ She laughed. I’ve never had that trouble before, but that’s the bugbear when you’re lying in bed, congestion.

  Pause.

  She said it’s a good job all the patients aren’t as little trouble as me or else half the nurses would be out of work. Funny, I didn’t use to like her, but she’s got a lot nicer lately. Her boy friend’s a trainee something-or-other. I forget what. She did tell me. They’re planning on moving to Australia.

  Pause.

  I’ve never been to Australia. She said if I wanted I could come out and visit them. I said, ‘Yes.’ Only I couldn’t go. I couldn’t be doing with all that sun.

  Pause.

  When Princess Alexandra came round this was the bed she stopped at, apparently.

  Pause.

  Sister’s been better lately, too. The one I can’t stand is Nurse Conkie. Never stops smiling. Great big smile. When they took old Mrs Boothman away just the same. Great big smile.

  Pause.

  Vicar round today. Think it was today. Beard. Sports jacket. Student, I thought, at first.

  Pause.

  Chatted. Bit before he got round to God. Says God singles you out for suffering. If you suffer shows you’re somebody special in the eyes of God. He said he knew this from personal experience. His wife suffers from migraine.

  Pause.

  Do without being somebody special, this lot.

  Pause.

  There’s a vicar goes round at Farnley, where my Dad is. Sits.

  Pause.

  Miss Brunskill came. Revolution at work. 406 and 405 knocked into one. Do your own photocopying now. Do it yourself, cut out the middleman. I said, ‘Where did I fit in?’ and she was telling me, only I must have dropped off and when I woke up she’d gone. Niche somewhere.

  Pause.

  I’ve been lucky with buses when I think back. I don’t know what it is but just as I get to the bus stop up comes the bus. It must be a knack. I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait more than two minutes for a bus, even when it’s been a really spasmodic service.

  Pause.

  I wish they wouldn’t laugh.

  Pause.

  There shouldn’t be laughing.

  Pause.

  If they just left me alone I. should be all right. ‘Schofield, Margaret, Miss.’ I’ve got a fly: keeps coming down. Must like me. There’s a woman comes over and talks to me sometimes. Telling some tale. I close my eyes.

  Pause.

  Somebody was telling me about Rhyl. Still very select, apparently. No crowds.

  Pause.

  Here’s my friend. This fly.

  She smiles.

  I said to Nurse Gillis, ‘It’s singled me out.’ She laughed.

  GO TO BLACK THEN UP. The final shot is of an empty bed with the mattress folded back. The light is hard and white.

  FADE OUT.

  Introduction to Talking Heads

  These six monologues were written and recorded for BBC television in 1987. Forms, one is often led to think, dictate themselves, the material demanding to be written in a particular way and no other. I would be happy to think this were so with these pieces but I’m not sure it’s true. A Chip in the Sugar, for instance, or Bed Among the Lentils could both have been written as plays proper. It would be fun to see Mr Turnbull, Mrs Whittaker’s fancy man, in the flesh (and his three-quarter-length windcheater), or Mrs Shrubsole doing her ruthless flower arranging — see them for ourselves, that is, rather than through the eyes of Graham and Susan who narrate those respective stories. But then they would be different stories, more objective, rounded and altogether fairer to the people the narrator is talking about. None of these narrators after all is telling the whole story. Geoffrey, Susan’s husband, may be a nicer, more forbearing man than her account of him might lead us to suppose; and Mr Turnbull may not be quite the common fellow (‘could have been a bookie’) the jealous Graham is so ready to disparage. And were these monologues plays there would be room for qualification and extenuation, allowances could be made, redemptions hinted at, a different point of view. Instead there is a single point of view, that of the speaker alone with the camera, and with the rest of the story pictured and peopled by the viewer more effort is demanded of the imagination. In this sense to watch a monologue on the screen is closer to reading a short story than watching a play.

  Admittedly it is a stripped-down version of a short story, the style of its telling necessarily austere. ‘Said’ or ‘says’ is generally all that is required to introduce reported speech, because whereas the novelist or short story writer has a battery of expressions to choose from (‘exclaimed’, ‘retorted’, ‘groaned’, ‘lisped’), in live narration such terms seem literary and self-conscious. Adverbs too (‘she remarked, tersely’) seem to over-egg the pudding or else acquire undue weight in the mouth of a supposedly artless narrator. And these narrators are artless. They don’t quite know what they are saying and are telling a story to the meaning of which they are not entirely privy. In A Chip in the Sugar Graham would not accept that he is married to his mother, or Miss Ruddock in A Lady of Letters that she is not a public-spirited guardian of morals. In Soldiering On Muriel ends up knowing her husband ruined her daughter but is no closer to realising that she had a hand in it too. Lesley in Her Big Chance thinks she has a great deal to offer both as an actress and a person, and Susan, the vicar’s wife in Bed Among the Lentils, doesn’t realise it’s not just the woman in the off-licence but the whole parish that knows she’s on the drink. Only Doris, the old lady who has fallen and broken her hip in A Cream Cracker Under the Settee, knows the score and that she is done for, but though she can see it’s her determination to dust that’s brought about her downfall, what she doesn’t see is that it’s the same obsession that tidied her husband into the grave.

  I am disturbed as I was with a previous collection of television plays to note so many repetitions and recurrences. There are droves of voluntary workers, umpteen officials from the social services, and should there be a knock on the door it’s most likely to be a bearded vicar. Even Emily Brontë turns up twice. If I’m guilty of repeating myself, on another count I plead innocence. The suspicion of child abuse in A Lady of Letters and the hint of it in Soldiering On might suggest I am straining after topicality. My instinct is generally to take flight in the opposite direction and in fact both these pieces were written and recorded before the subject began regularly to hit the headlines, which it may well have ceased to do by the time the programmes are transmitted. Since several of the characters fare badly at the hands of social and community workers I might seem to be taking a currently fashionable line here also. In the popular press nowadays social workers are generally (and easily) abused. I have little experience of them and to seem to line up with the Sun or the Daily Express would dismay me. My quarrel with social work is not with its praiseworthy practicalities but with the jargon in which it’s sometimes conducted. Graham’s ‘I am not being defensive about sexual intercourse; she is my mother’ is a protest about language.

  Some of the events in these stories stem from actual occurrences in my life, though they are often joined to it by a very narrow isthmus. The funeral with which Soldiering On be
gins (though none of the characters in it) was suggested by the funeral of the composer George Fenton’s father, who had been in Colditz and like Ralph had touched life at many points. Though much of the church stuff in Bed Among the Lentils (including Mr Medlicott the verger) comes from my childhood, the disaffection of Susan, the vicar’s wife, I can trace to opening a hymn book in the chapel of Giggleswick School and finding in tiny, timid letters on the fly leaf, ‘Get lost, Jesus’. Of these six characters only Lesley, the small-part actress, is wholly modern (while being quite old-fashioned). She and dozens like her have auditioned for films and plays I’ve done in the last twenty years. One of the first Lesley-like characters was a boy who came up for a part in Forty Years On. The director asked him what he had done:

  ‘I was in George Bernard Shaw.’

  ‘What did you play?’

  ‘The drums.’

  Perky, undefeated, their hopes of stardom long since gone, these actors retail the films and plays one might have glimpsed them in, playing waiters or barmen or, like Lesley, travelling on the back of a farm cart next to the star, wearing a shawl, the shawl ‘original nineteenth-century embroidery, all hand done’. I saw an actor for a part not long ago who had been in a few episodes of Emmerdale Farm. ‘I played the postman,’ he said, ‘only I haven’t done any since. They don’t seem to be getting much mail.’

  Another obsession goes back to childhood. The dog dirt outside Buckingham Palace that spoils Miss Ruddock’s Awayday and the ‘little hairs all up and down’ that rule out a dog for Doris betray a prejudice inherited from my father, who was a butcher in Leeds. He was plagued by dogs: ‘Get out, you nasty lamppost-smelling little article,’ he shouted once as he raced some unfortunate mongrel from the shop, and now thirty years later Doris has the line. It was my father too who had a craze for fretwork, but whereas for Doris’s husband Wilfred fretwork is just one of his dreams (‘toys and forts and whatnot, no end of money he was going to make’), with Dad it was no dream. Sitting at his little treadle saw with plans from Hobbies Magazine beside him he made forts and farms for my brother and me, a toy butcher’s shop once and wonderfully elaborate constructions of ramps and trapdoors into which we shot marbles. This was at the start of the Second War when toys were scarce, and for a few years he was able to make a little money selling some of his stuff to a toyshop down County Arcade off Briggate. It wasn’t much though. ‘You want to ask a bit more,’ my mam used to say. ‘They take advantage of you. That’s your trouble, Walt, you won’t push yourself.’ Which sounds like Doris again. Toy penguins were Dad’s speciality, made out of three-ply and set on a sturdy green four-wheeled cart. Did we ever come across a child pulling one of these creations it was a big event and we would trail behind, scanning the face of its small owner for any evidence of pleasure in this (to me very dull) toy, Dad presumably experiencing some of the same pleasure a writer gets when he catches someone reading his book.

  It’s with mixed feelings that I see tattoos are (twice) sniffed at, along with red paint, yellow gloves and two-tone cardigans. These disparagements too date back to home and childhood, where they were items in a catalogue of disapproval that ranged through (fake) leopardskin coats, dyed (blonde) hair to slacks, cocktail cabinets and statuettes of ladies with alsatian dogs on leash. In our house and in my mother’s idiosyncratic scheme of things they were all common. Common is not an easy term to define without seeming to brand the user as snobbish or socially pretentious, which my mother wasn’t. But it was always her distinction: I never remember my father making it, and both in its use and application common tended to be a woman’s term. ‘She’s a common woman’ one heard more often (was more common) than ‘He’s a common feller’, perhaps because in those days women had more time and inclination to make such distinctions. A common woman was likely to swear or drink (or drink ‘shorts’), to get all dolled up and go out leaving the house upside down and make no bones about having affairs. Enjoy herself, possibly, and that was the trouble; a common woman sidestepped her share of the proper suffering of her sex. What was also being criticised was an element of pretension and display (the dyed blonde hair, the too-tight slip-over, the face plastered with make-up). Elsie Tanner was a common woman, as with her curlers and too ready opinions is Hilda Ogden. And so, I thought as a child, was Mary Magdalene.

  Sudden money augmented the risk and pools winners would find it hard to avoid the epithet. Hence the unfortunate tale ofVivien Nicholson, the Yorkshire pools winner and heroine of Jack Rosenthal’s Spend, Spend, Spend. Her persistent car crashes and the dramas and notorieties of her personal life were never out of the Evening Post. ‘Well,’ my mother used to say, as Mrs N wrote off yet another of her cars and her lovers in some frightful motorway pile-up, ‘she’s a common woman.’ No other explanation was necessary.

  Places could be common too, particularly at the seaside. Blackpool was common (people enjoying themselves), Morecambe less so (not enjoying themselves as much), and Grange or Lytham not common at all (enjoyment not really on the agenda). If we ever did get to Blackpool we stayed at Cleveleys or Bispham, the refined end. To my brother and me (and I suspect to the local estate agents) refined just meant furthest away from the funfair. Not that where we stayed made much difference to the type of boarding house or the mixed bag we found there. To some extent my mother’s nice distinctions were subjective and self-fulfilling: we met a better class of person where we stayed because we kept out of the way of the rest, Palm Court rather than bathing beauties, not the knobbly knees contest but a Wallace Arnold to Windermere. Package holidays came too late for my parents but had they ever ventured abroad they would have taken their attitudes with them. My mam would soon have located the Bispham end of Benidorm, a select part to Sitges. ‘Well, we don’t like it all hectic, do we, Dad?’

  Common persists. It’s not a distinction I’d want to be detected making but to myself I make it still. There are some lace (or more likely nylon) curtains popular nowadays that are gathered up for some reason in the middle. They look to me like a woman who’s been to the lav and got her underskirt caught up behind her. They’re absurd but that’s not my real objection. They’re common. The mock Georgian doorways that disfigure otherwise decent houses, the so-called Kentucky fried Georgian, offend me because they’re cheap, inappropriate, ill-proportioned …and common.

  Finally vicars who, Anglican though not always specified as such, turn up in all but one of these pieces, earnest, visitant and resolutely contemporary. Several are bearded, one is in trainers and most are in mufti. I have no particular wish to lock the clergy out of the wardrobe or ban them the boutique, but along with postmen and porters I wish they had not abandoned black. Just as postmen nowadays look like members of the Rumanian airforce so cassocks come in beige and even lilac, and if a parson submits to the indignity of a dog collar the chances are it has gone slimline, peeping coyly above a modish number in some fetching pastel shade. Nuns too have lost their old billowing, wimpled innocence and now look like prison wardresses on the loose. Even hearses have gone grey, black altogether too uncompromising a colour, life something to be shaded out of when, after much suffering tastefully borne, we blend nicely into the grave.

  The clergy not wanting to look the part has something to do with the dismantling of the Book of Common Prayer. Anxious not to sound like parsons they can hardly be blamed for not wanting to look like them either. The ‘underneath this cassock I am but a man like any other’ act that Geoff does in Bed Among the Lentils must be a familiar routine at many a church door. And it’s not of course new. Priests have always hankered after the world, or at any rate the worldly, and consorting as He did with publicans and sinners it was Jesus who started the rot. Or so Susan would say.

  I don’t know why it should be only Catholics who are thought never to escape their religious upbringing; I have never managed to outgrow mine. When I was sixteen and not long confirmed I was devoutly religious, a regular communicant who knew the service off by heart. It might be thought this
would rejoice a vicar’s heart and maybe it did, but actually I think the parish clergy found my fervour faintly embarrassing. A fervent Anglican is a bit of a contradiction in terms anyway, but I was conscious that my constant presence at the Eucharist, often midweek as well as Sundays, was thought to be rather unhealthy. As the celebrant sallied forth from the vestry on a cold winter’s morning and found me sitting or (like Miss Frobisher, never one to let an opportunity slip) getting in a spot of silent prayer, he must have felt like a doctor opening the surgery door and discovering the sole occupant of the waiting room some tiresome hypochondriac (I was that too actually). Shy, bespectacled and innocent of the world I knew I was a disappointment to the clergy. What they wanted were brands to pluck from the burning and that was not me by a long chalk; I’d never even been near the fire.