The Complete Talking Heads

by Alan Bennett

  When the Sistine Chapel was being restored in the 1980s, anyone with influence in the art world would be taken up in the lift to watch the restorers at work. Thus it was that several people I came across claimed to have reached out and touched either the hand of God or the finger of Adam. Easy-going as the Italians are I would be surprised if these accounts were altogether true but they gave me the idea for the beginning of a film script, The Hand of God, which I wrote but never managed to get produced. The script centred round a priceless drawing by Michelangelo of the hand of God wearing the ring of Michelangelo’s patron, Julius II, and it’s this drawing which (never having made it into a film script) turns up in the box of odds and ends grudgingly given to Celia on the death of Miss Ventriss.

  ‘If you love beautiful things,’ says Celia, ‘which is why I came into this business in the first place, it breaks your heart.’ I detect here a thirtyyear-old echo of the only TV comedy series I ever did, On the Margin. The first programme featured an antique shop, with myself as the camp proprietor:

  DEALER If you don’t see what you want you’ve only got to ask. I don’t put everything in the shop window.

  CUSTOMER Could I just sort of nose around?

  DEALER Feel free. You must excuse my hands but I’ve just been stripping a tallboy.

  [All this seemed quite daring in 1966.]

  Mind you I’m not in this business to make money. I’m in this business because I like beautiful things and I like beautiful people to have beautiful things. Which is why I’m very anxious to sell something to you. You see, I believe, perhaps wrongly, that if only all the beautiful people in the world had all the beautiful things there would be No More War. Don’t you agree?

  There is some irony in the fact that this blueprint for world peace was addressed to the young John Sergeant, who played the Customer but who is now the doyen of the BBC’s political correspondents.

  Nowadays antique shops are getting thin on the ground, most selling done not through shops but at antique fairs and car boot sales. It’s an altogether more knowing business than it was, Sotheby’s and Christie’s having started the process and shaken down the country in quest of anything saleable. Celia remarks that Sotheby’s and Christie’s are no better than barrow boys: rather worse, in my view, as barrow boys don’t charge a percentage to both buyer and seller and make them feel socially inferior into the bargain. Then there’s the Antiques Road Show which has set everyone scouring their attics and fetching out their cherished heirlooms. Despite their eagerness to know the value of their precious possessions I have never seen anyone on the programme admit to wanting to sell the objects in question. It’s a cosy contribution to our national hypocrisy.

  I imagine Celia’s shop as bare and uninviting, full of big furniture with not much in it in the way of bric-a-brac, the kind of shop I’d think twice about going into. Such establishments, though, are no longer the norm. Antique shops, as Celia would be the first to point out, have come down in the world. Typical stock nowadays might be a lace doyley; a napkin ring; a Penguin Special from the forties; an empty scent spray from a thirties’ dressing table, redolent of long-dead 4711, and an old Oxo tin. Not antiques at all, of course, but ‘collectables’.

  And collectables that tread hard on the heels of the present so one is nowadays regularly confronted by items classified as antiques which one remembers in common use. Milk was brought round from door to door when I was a boy by Mr Keen the milkman with his horse and cart — and this in suburban Armley. The milk was ladled out of his lidded oval pail in gill measures, both pail and measure now regularly on offer in antique shops, the pewter buffed, the brass polished and both, I suppose, serving ultimately as receptacles for flowers or the ubiquitous pot-pourri. The history of popular taste in the eighties and nineties could be charted via the march of pot-pourri; in the twenties scenting Ottoline Morrell’s lacquered rooms at Garsington, today, as Celia points out, on sale at any garage.

  I miss the old-fashioned antique shops: Slee’s on the upper floors of premises on Boar Lane in Leeds, where the stock was so shabby and slow-moving it seemed as if it had been aged on the premises; Taylor’s in Harrogate which had in its window photographs of that famous magpie, Queen Mary, emerging from the shop in her toque and parasol, with some hapless lady-in-waiting bringing up the rear with the articles Her Majesty had admired and which etiquette demanded she must forthwith be given. Another classy establishment was Frank Williams’ in Burford in Oxfordshire where I remember first going forty years ago as an undergraduate and which is now reduced to selling shirts, though at least it doesn’t sell the ‘pictures of mice in pinnies-type-thing’ that Celia groans about (though there’s no shortage of that in Burford either). And I know all this is snobbish and strikes the lacrimae rerum note; I should leave Celia, though a far from sympathetic character, to voice my regrets and reminiscences for me.

  I realise, incidentally, as I write that the finger of God which is Celia’s downfall is (and it was entirely unintentional) the finger that singles out the winners of the National Lottery.

  Just as in the first series of Talking Heads there is only one male monologue and five by women. After that series a viewer wrote to me suggesting that if I wrote a series wholly for men I could call it Talking Balls. Which, had I been able to write six male monologues, I would happily have done. That I can’t, I put down to the fact that when I was a child the women did most of the talking so that I’ve been more attuned to the discourse of women than to that of men, and though such real life monologues I come across nowadays are generally in the mouths of men I don’t find male talk easy to reproduce; though it’s easier when the men are damaged as Wilfred is in Playing Sandwiches and Graham in A Chip in the Sugar.

  Playing Sandwiches dates back twenty years and is linked to a very different play, The Old Country, in which the main character, Hilary, is, or has been, a Soviet spy working in the Foreign Office. Accustomed to rendezvous with his Russian opposite number at various locations in London’s outer suburbs he recalls how by sheer chance he nearly came to grief

  It’s quite hard to be absolutely alone. I never have. Though I have seen it. One particular afternoon I had been on one of my little jaunts, kept my appointment. Nothing unusual had occurred or was in the least likely to occur. It was a routine Thursday and I strolled back to the station across a piece of waste ground that I knew made a nice short cut. I must have seemed a slightly incongruous figure in my city clothes. I never dressed the part, even to the extent of an old raincoat. At which point I came over the brow of the hill and found myself facing a line of policemen, advancing slowly through the undergrowth, poking in ditches with long sticks, hunting for something. It appeared there was a child missing, believed dead. Clothes had been found; a shoe. It was a bad moment. I had no reason at all for being there. I was a senior official in the Foreign Office. What was I doing on a spring afternoon, with documents in my briefcase, crossing a common where a child had been murdered? As it was no one thought to ask me any questions at all. I looked too respectable. And indeed they already had a suspect waiting handcuffed in the police car. I joined in the search and was with them when they found the child about half an hour later, lying in a heap at the foot of a wall. I just got a glimpse of her legs, white, like mushrooms, before they threw a blanket over her. She had been dead a week. I saw the man as the police car drew away through lines of jeering housewives and people cycling home from work. Then they threw a blanket over him too. The handy blanket. And I have a feeling he was eventually hanged. Anyway it was in those days. I came back, replaced the documents, had my tea by the fire in the Foreign Office. I took in some parliamentary questions for the minister, had dinner at the Garrick and walked home across the park. And in a tiled room at Uxbridge Police Station there would have been that young man waiting. Alone in a cell. Alone in custody. Alone at large. A man without home or haven. That is what you have to do to be cast out. Murder children. Nothing else quite does the trick, because any other crime wil
l always find you friends. Rape them, kill them and be caught.

  (The Old Country, pp. 52—3)

  The young man has had to wait twenty years for his case to be considered so he is no longer quite so young or living in the metropolitan suburbs but two hundred miles north near a municipal park. But it is the same man.

  I am repelled by the self-righteous morality of gaols and their hierarchy of offences whereby murder and grievous bodily harm are thought of as respectable crimes and sexual offences are not. I also feel that the press hysteria over paedophilia, and in particular over offences that occurred long in the past, has reached dangerous proportions and the availability of monetary compensation for the possible psychological effects of these injuries has made the situation more fraught with difficulties. But such is the atmosphere surrounding the subject that one thinks twice before setting out any opinions one might have on the matter.

  Murder is a messy business and for Marjory in The Outside Dog one feels it’s just another skirmish in her continuing campaign against dirt. Even a more balanced character like Rosemary in Nights in the Gardens of Spain shares some of the same concerns so her first thought in seeing Mr McCorquodale’s blood on the sheepskin rug is what a job it’s going to be getting it off.

  Somewhere Proust says that no matter how sad the occasion with women it will eventually resolve itself into a question of trying on. It could, more charitably, be said to turn into a question of cleaning down, though that’s a side of life Proust didn’t see much of.

  Keeping dirt at bay in the way that Marjory does used to take up a substantial part of every housewife’s day: there was the shaking of the rugs, the blackleading of the range, having a run round with the Ewbank, not to mention putting mountains of washing through the wringer. This was the lot of every self-respecting housewife in Leeds in my childhood, where in addition to the soot there was a continuous rain of fine grit from Kirkstall Power Station.

  For a woman to adhere to such a routine (and the assumptions behind it) today seems wilful or neurotic, a deliberate narrowing of the scope and satisfactions of her sex. In those days keeping a clean house was the be-all and end-all, every day the occasion for the ceremony of purification, the successive stages of which culminated around the middle of the afternoon with the celebrant sinking into a chair before making the solemn declaration, ‘This is the first time I’ve sat down all day.’ There would then be a brief interval before the children came home from school and the men from work and the place was turned upside down again.

  I see my mother sitting by the newly blackleaded range, her leg nearest the grate mottled blue-black by the fire as women’s legs often were then, and saying imploringly, ‘I’ve just got the place straight. Don’t upset.’

  This is not the first time I have written about it:

  1 May 1978, Hartlepool (Afternoon Off)

  We film in the sluice room of the cottage hospital. Racks of stainlesssteel bottles and bedpans, a sink that flushes and a hideously stained drum on which the bedpans are sluiced out. This room would be my mother’s nightmare. Conditions are cramped and I crouch behind the camera tripod in order to see the action. I am kneeling on the floor under the bedpan sluice. If my Mam saw this she would want to throw away trousers, raincoat, every particle of clothing that might have been touched and polluted. This has got into the film. Thora Hird plays a patient in the hospital being visited by her husband.

  ‘I bet the house is upside down,’ she says to him.

  ‘It never is,’ says her husband. ‘I did the kitchen floor this morning.’

  ‘Which bucket did you use?’

  ‘The red one.’

  She is outraged. ‘That’s the outside bucket. I shall have it all to do again.’

  I am assuming this is common ground and that the tortuous boundary between the clean and the dirty is a frontier most households share. It was very marked in ours. My mother maintained an intricate hierarchy of cloths, buckets and dusters, to the Byzantine differentiations of which she alone was privy. Some cloths were dish cloths but not sink cloths; some were for the sink but not for the floor. There were dirty buckets and clean buckets, brushes for indoors, brushes for the flags. One mop had a universal application while another had a unique and terrible purpose and had to be kept outside, hung on the wall. And however rinsed and clean these utensils were they remained tainted by their awful function. Left to himself my Dad would violate these taboos, using the first thing that came to hand to clean the hearth or wash the floor. ‘It’s all nowt,’ he’d mutter, but if Mam was around he knew it saved time and temper to observe her order of things. Latterly, disposable cloths and kitchen rolls tended to blur these ancient distinctions but the basic structure remained, perhaps the firmest part of the framework of her world. When she was ill with depression the order broke down: the house became dirty. Spotless though Dad kept it, she saw it as ‘upside down’, dust an unstemmable tide and the house’s (imagined) squalor a talking point for the neighbours. So that when she came home from the hospital, bright and better, her first comment was always how clean the house looked. And not merely the house. It was as if the whole world and her existence in it had been rinsed clean.

  (Writing Home, pp. 277-8)

  As a child I had a recurring dream, imperfectly dramatised in my play Intensive Care, in which my mother and I were sitting in a spotless house when suddenly the coalman burst through the door and trailed muck throughout the house. Though the dream owed something to the then adverts for Walpamur in which a child covered an immaculate wall with dirty hand prints, looking back I see that this intrusive coalman was probably my father, which accounts for the fact that, despite my alarm, my mother took this intrusion quite calmly. I can see that The Outside Dog is another version of this dream; not that that is much help to the viewer or the reader, though it may be useful fodder for the A Level candidates.

  The Vale of York, where the open prison is located in Nights in the Gardens of Spain and where Rosemary and Mrs McCorquodale go on some of their jaunts, was just out of biking range when I was a boy and so seldom visited. Pre-prairified and dotted with ancient villages, duck ponds and grand country houses, it was a distant sunlit idyll and seemed to me a foretaste of what life must be like Down South. It was England as it was written about in children’s books, and because I go there seldom still, it has retained some of this enchantment. Visiting country churches, which I used to do as a boy, is something I’ve rediscovered in middle age so in that sense I identify with Rosemary though not where gardening is concerned. I am no gardener, never managing to take a long enough view of things, finding the whole business not unstressful; I see the battle against weeds (ground elder in particular) as a fight against evil and one which invariably puts me in a bad temper.

  Prison for Mrs McCorquodale is a kind of release just as it was for Miss Ruddock in A Lady of Letters in the first Talking Heads. This is a romanticised view, I’m sure, and having occasionally had to speak in men’s prisons it is not a view I would so glibly advance on their behalf. I tend to regard women’s prisons as women’s institutes with bars on the windows, a prison sentence an ideal opportunity to brush up on the rug-making or learn French. If it were ever so it is not so now, education and vocational training in both men’s and women’s prisons the first victims of cut-backs.

  I was put off writing Waiting for the Telegram for a long time because of the purely practical consideration that Violet would have to be impossibly old (nearly a hundred) to have had a sweetheart killed in the First War. And, of course, the longer I delayed writing the script the more acute the problem became. Eventually I decided that the time factor didn’t really matter: in an old people’s home time goes at a trickle anyway, what year it is is not of much consequence, least of all to the residents whose own age is often something of a mystery as it certainly is to Violet.

  I see her living as a girl up Tong Road in Leeds, the route traversed by the No. 16 tram, the tram Violet feels she should have told Spencer abou
t. It was a neighbourhood close-packed with red brick backto-backs, including ‘The Avenues’, a run of eighteen streets named by their number, First Avenue, Second Avenue and so on. This was instanced in some sociological account I read as an example of the soullessness of nineteenth-century slum development but it wasn’t quite like that. Each avenue had an atmosphere of its own, some certainly better (more genteel), others rougher or dirtier but far from being components in a featureless urban desert that the bare numbers might suggest.

  Tong Road, with Sleights the greengrocers, Burras Peake’s the outfitters, Gallons the grocers, and Hustwitt’s the sheet music and gramophone shop, has long since gone – all that is left the unchanging black silhouette of St Bartholomew’s and, a few streets over, Armley Gaol, twin bulwarks of church and state. Nowadays, with flimsy new houses clustered around the gaol, Tong Road seems bleaker than it ever was and certainly with less character, though doubtless a child brought up there today would be able to discriminate between its seemingly identical streets as effortlessly as we did then.

  Some question arose during the rehearsing of the piece about the nature of a vanilla slice. It is, I suppose, a downmarket version of a millefeuille, with confectioner’s custard sandwiched between layers of flaky pastry and topped off with white icing. Someone bringing vanilla slices home from the confectioner’s, fancies too, and certainly fruit pies, would bear the bag like the priest the host, held high on the flat of the hand lest the fruit leak out or the icing adhere to the paper bag. It’s a sight — a rite almost — that I associate with Saturday dinner-time when we would be sent ‘on to the end‘to McDade’s, the confectioner’s on the corner of Tong Road and Gilpin Place, to get something ‘to finish off with’.