Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 1

by Alan Bennett

  NURSIE: There’s a drop on your nose, dear. Use my handkerchief. And is that dinner down your frock. Tsk, tsk.

  HUGH: I’d better get down to the House.

  NURSIE: On a Sunday?

  MOGGIE: Perhaps we’ll come and sit in the gallery. It’ll be a bit of history. Come along.

  NURSIE: I can’t go yet. There’s an air raid on and I haven’t got my gas-mask. Just think. All those people to knit for. There’s not a moment to lose.

  (The area representing Claridge’s is downstage left. The changeovers from Claridge’s to the memoirs should be done as cuts, not soft fades.

  Cut to the LECTERN.

  CHARTERIS, who is also the Prompter for the School Play, sits below the lectern. It is his job to alter the Hymn Board. He now puts up the date of the reading – 1900.)

  LECTERN: As the bells rang out on that last day of the old century, they did not ring out the end of one era and the beginning of another. To enter upon the new century was not like opening a door and crossing a threshold. The old Queen was still alive, and when she died most of what she stood for lived on.

  And so, as the lights go up on the twentieth century we are still in the world of Elgar and Beerbohm, the age of Oscar Wilde.

  (Enter WITHERS, the butler, played by the HEADMASTER. pushing LADY DUNDOWN, an Edwardian dowager (TEMPEST) in a wheel-chair.)

  LADY D: Is there anything in the newspaper this morning, Withers?

  WITHERS: They have named another battleship after Queen Victoria, ma’am.

  LADY D: Another? She must be beginning to think there is some resemblance. I see the Dean of Windsor has been consecrated Bishop of Bombay.

  WITHERS: Bombay. Hmm. If I may say so, ma’am, that seems to me to be taking Christianity a little too far.

  LADY D: And where is your good lady wife on this bright summer’s morning?

  WITHERS: Still at death’s door, I’m afraid, m’lady.

  LADY D: Still? But she has been there now for the last sixteen years.

  WITHERS: Yes. And I, m’lady, I have never left her bedside.

  LADY D: So I see. A great mistake, if I may say so. You should remember the proverb, a watched pot never boils. Well, Withers, you must not take up any more of my valuable time. And besides, I must speak to my nephew.

  WITHERS: But I cannot see him anywhere.

  LADY D: A sure sign that he is in the vicinity. Gerald! (GERALD GROSVENOR enters in a scarlet military tunic, carrying a pith helmet with plumes.)

  GERALD: Good morning, Aunt Sedilia.

  LADY D: The weather is immaterial. Gerald, do I detect a somewhat military note in your appearance? What is the reason for these warlike habilaments?

  GERALD: I have been called to the Colours.

  LADY D: Indeed? Whereabouts?

  GERALD: South Africa.

  LADY D: South Africa? I trust that will not interfere with your attendance at my dances?

  GERALD: I’m afraid so.

  LADY D: Tsk, tsk. How can the Zulu expect to be treated as civilized people when they declare war in the middle of the season!

  GERALD: It’s not the Zulu, Aunt Sedilia. It’s the Boer.

  LADY D: It comes to the same thing. I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment. Which brings me to my point. Your marriage. I have been going through my list and have hit upon the ideal person. Lady Maltby.

  GERALD: Lady Maltby!

  LADY D: Constance Maltby. (She rises from wheel-chair.) I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to. Consider her advantages. She is in full possession of all her faculties, plus the usual complement of limbs … and enough in such matters, I always think, is as good as a feast.

  GERALD: I have heard it said that her legs leave something to be desired.

  LADY D: All legs leave something to be desired, do they not?

  That is part of their function and all of their charm. But to continue. Like all stout women she is very fat, but then, it would be inconsistent of her to be otherwise, would it not?

  GERALD: Is she not connected with Trade?

  LADY D: Trade? Nonsense. Her father made a fortune by introducing the corset to the Esquimaux. That is not trade. It is philanthropy.

  GERALD: And she is very old fashioned besides.

  LADY D: If by that you mean she dresses like her mother, yes she is. But then all women dress like their mothers, that is their tragedy. No man ever does. That is his. You have something to say?

  GERALD: Yes, Aunt Sedilia. You see, I have been engaged before. Several times.

  LADY D: I am aware that you have been engaged, though, if I may say so, much after the manner of a public lavatory … often and for very short periods.

  (The HEADMASTER who has been lurking off stage, now interrupts.)

  HEADMASTER: I don’t think that’s very funny, Tempest. If you want to make people laugh you shouldn’t have to go to the lavatory to do it. And Skinner…

  SKINNER: Yes, sir.

  HEADMASTER: You may regard this as a heaven sent opportunity to draw with your fountain pen on that boy’s neck, but I don’t. Continue, Tempest.

  TEMPEST: Er … I’ve forgotten it … (To prompter) Yes, Charteris, yes.

  CHARTERIS: Er … (He leafs through his copy as TEMPEST goes over to him.)

  TEMPEST: You’re not even on the right page. And what’s this? Vogue? Vogue! A boy reading Vogue, Headmaster. You’re supposed to be prompting, not reading Vogue. I’ll Vogue you, young man, if you don’t attend to what you’re doing.

  (He throws Vogue off the stage and finds the line on the page.)

  LADY D: You must be married next week.

  GERALD: Impossible!

  LADY D: Impossible! There seems to be an element of defeatism in that reply. Why, pray?

  GERALD: Lady Dundown, Aunt Sedilia, I cannot marry Lady Maltby next week, because Lady Maltby is my mother.

  LADY D: Well, would the week after do? I beg your pardon?

  GERALD: Lady Maltby is my mother.

  HEADMASTER: Disgusting! (He exits in despair.)

  LADY D: For how long has this been the case?

  GERALD: Almost as long as I can remember.

  LADY D: I see. One question, Mr Grosvenor. Was your mother ever married?

  GERALD: No, I must confess it, Lady Dundown, she never was.

  LADY D: Splendid. My dear Gerald, wherein lies the difficulty. Your mother is a spinster, albeit not without blot. You, nameless, dishonoured, fatherless creature that you are, are unmarried. Marriage between your mother and yourself would make a decent man of you and an honest woman of her. Indeed the arrangement seems so tidy I am surprised it does not happen more often in society. Dear me. How cold it has turned. I must go in and put on another rope of pearls. The chair, Mr Grosvenor, if you please.

  (Two treble voices sing ‘South of the Border’ or some other popular song of 1939–40.

  Lights up on Claridge’s. HUGH is sitting in his gas-mask. MOGGIE is reading a letter. NURSIE is knitting.)

  RADIO: Your gas-mask is a delicate instrument. It is not a toy. Treat it well. Your life may depend on it. Your gas-mask should be marked clearly with your name and Identity Card number. Take it with you wherever you go. Do not let it out of your sight even when you are asleep. Practise wearing it for an hour each day until you are thoroughly accustomed to it. Failure to comply with these regulations is punishable by a fine of up to £5.

  NURSIE: You’ve only had it on five minutes. The man said an hour.

  HUGH: Doesn’t do to overdo it. Little and often.

  NURSIE: It’s all very well for you, young man. You’ve got a gas-mask. I’ve lost mine. What if there’s an alert and they catch me without it.

  HUGH: You’ll be smothered.

  NURSIE: I don’t mind that. But I don’t want to be fined. I should never live it down.

  MOGGIE: I wonder where Christopher is. He says he’s not allowed to say,
but we would know where he is if he said he was where Charles and Lena spent their honeymoon.

  HUGH: Oswestry.

  MOGGIE: What?

  HUGH: Oswestry.

  MOGGIE: Nobody ever spent their honeymoon at Oswestry. I thought it was Paris.

  HUGH: The artillery go to Oswestry. Any other clues?

  MOGGIE: He says he saw Napoleon’s tomb this morning. That doesn’t sound very much like Oswestry to me.

  NURSIE: You button your lip, young lady. Careless talk costs lives.

  MOGGIE: Don’t be silly, Nursie, there’s only us here.

  NURSIE: How do you know I’m not a German parachutist?

  HUGH: German parachutists don’t knit, Nursie.

  NURSIE: Lord Haw Haw said that the clock at Grantchester had stopped at ten to three. And it had. Somebody must be telling them.

  MOGGIE: I do hope he’s all right. Paris is such an awful fleshpot.

  NURSIE: He’ll be all right so long as he doesn’t drink the water.

  MOGGIE: We’re not winning in France, are we?

  HUGH: Well, if we are, the sites of the victories are getting nearer and nearer. Though why you expect me to know I can’t imagine. I’m only in the Ministry of Information and we’re always the last to know.

  NURSIE: It must be terribly difficult retreating. Fancy having to walk backwards all that way!

  HUGH: There’s one thing. The weather is as perfect as it always is when the world is quaking. I remember just about this time of year in 1914 Father saying much the same to Edmund Gosse. He agreed and said it had been just the same in 1870.

  MOGGIE: They used to have really piping hot days. In 1911 during the Home Rule crisis it was 97 degrees. Ninety-seven!

  NURSIE: It was too hot. It was too fine to last at the beginning of this century. Fine before seven, rain before eleven, that’s what I say. Lend me your gas-mask. I can do a bit of practice just in case.

  (CHARTERIS alters the hymn board to 1906.)

  LECTERN: In those days it seemed the sun would always shine.

  NURSIE: Queen’s Weather we used to call it, when the old Queen was still alive. And that was how it was all those years before the war.

  MOGGIE: Then in 1914 it begins to rain and all through the war and after it never stops.

  HEADMASTER: The war and everything that comes after grey and wet and misty and nasty.

  HUGH: Never a fine day in the trenches was there.

  NURSI: Rain on Armistice Day.

  MOGGIE: Rain on the queues that wait for the Dole.

  HUGH: Rain on the wet tarmac as they search the empty sky waiting for an old man with a piece of paper.

  HEADMASTER: But over the smooth green lawns of the Edwardian era, the sun seemed always to shine, like one’s last summer term at school that memory has turned all to gold.

  (TEMPEST as a MAX BEERBOHM figure, sits at a garden table with a straw hat and cane. As he speaks one of the boys moves round him playing the violin like a café violinist. But he should be playing one of the lush, nostalgic themes from Elgar’s Violin Concerto.)

  TEMPEST: Berkshire and Hampshire, Leicester and Rutland, those were the Edwardian counties. One breath of their pine-laden air and I am through the door in the wall, back in the land of lost content. I am a young man on a summer afternoon at Melton or Belvoir, sitting in the garden with my life before me and the whole vale dumb in the heat. Is it my fancy? Did I ever take tea on those matchless lawns? Did apricots ripen against old walls and the great horn still sound at sunset? One boat on the wan, listless waters of the lake and nothing stirring in Europe for years and years and years.

  HUGH: That’s not how it was. That’s only how he thinks it was. Really it was wars and rumours of wars just like any other time.

  TEMPEST: It was what Disraeli called ‘The sustained splendour of a stately life’.

  HUGH: And Harold Nicolson ‘that jaded lobster, the Edwardian era’. Switch it off, Nursie.

  TEMPEST: How hard it is now to recall what it was like, that self-contained world of the Big House in those far-off days when the century was young and we were young with the century.

  HUGH: Those houses where we stayed… Grabbett, Lumber, Clout and Boot Lacy, their very names are a litany of a world we have lost.

  NURSIE: Is it too much to ask to be able to listen to my own wireless without you gallivanting on.

  TEMPEST: One would lie in one’s bed on a morning, half awake, listening to the sounds of the Great House coming to life around one. First about five, the soft closing of a door and a slow shuffling tread ….

  HUGH: Edward VII going back to his own room.

  TEMPEST: Ah, what sights those walls had seen. Here, here is Sargent’s portrait of the Lavery Sisters.

  HUGH: And here, oh here, is Landseer’s portrait of the Andrews Sisters. (He switches off the wireless.) Do you remember, my dear, those endless evenings of our Scottish summers the glens glowing in golden light and in the breeze the gentle tossing of the cabers.

  MOGGIE: If you want to talk in here, go outside and do it.

  HUGH: Already in the kitchens the day is far advanced and Mrs Buttocks the cook had been hard at work bedevilling the breakfast kidneys. Ah, those country house breakfasts. God, I remember those, the merry conversation of bacon sizzling in the pan; the chattering of a trio of succulent kidneys.

  MOGGIE: Kedgeree, cold partridge.

  HUGH: The warm fragrance of crisp brown rolls, and over all the heavenly benison of coffee. Are D’s two ounces or four?

  MOGGIE: What?

  HUGH: Points. The sweet ration. D’s and E’s. I was just reading my ration book. Lytton Strachey once said that in a perfect world one ought to read Sir Thomas Browne sitting between the paws of the Sphinx. Conversely I think it very fitting that I should be reading my ration book in the basement of Claridge’s.

  NURSIE: D’s are two and E’s are four.

  HUGH: Damn. I’ve only got two D’s to last me a whole month.

  NURSIE: You’re not going to wheedle any out of me, young man, that’s for sure.

  (CHARTERIS alters the hymn board to 1908 as a treble voice sings the hymn ‘Now the Day is Over’.)

  HUGH’S VOICE: When I was ill as a child at the turn of the century, I would have a night light burning in a green saucer of water right through into the morning and behind the scrap screen a bed would be set up for Nanny Gibbins. Very late as it seemed to me then, though downstairs the dancing would just be beginning, Nanny Gibbins came to bed.

  (NANNY GIBBINS is played by MATRON, and is a much more intimidating presence than NURSIE. At first only a voice behind the screen, she casts a monstrous shadow on the wall as she unbuckles her black bombazine armour and talks to the little boy in the bed.)

  BOY: What time is it, Nanny?

  NANNY: Time you were asleep, young man.

  BOY: What time is that?

  NANNY: Time you had a watch. Time you learned to say please. Time you knew better. Go to sleep.

  BOY: What are you doing, Nanny?

  NANNY: I’m doing what Tin doing. Go to sleep.

  BOY: Nanny!

  NANNY: What?

  BOY: I’ve got a pain in my leg.

  NANNY: Do you wonder you’ve got pains in your legs when you don’t do your business. Well, next time you’ll sit there till you do. Forgotten to fold your vest, young man. I can’t turn my back for two minutes. And clean on this afternoon.

  BOY: I feel sick.

  NANNY: Do you wonder you feel sick sitting on them hot pipes. How many more times must I tell you, you sit on them pipes you’ll catch piles.

  BOY: What are piles?

  NANNY: You mind your own business. Piles is piles, and you’ll know soon enough when you catch them because your insides’ll drop out and you’ll die and then where will you be? Lie down, sitting up at this time of night.

  BOY: What time is it?

  NANNY: Time for Bedfordshire. Time you had your bottom smacked.

  BOY: Can I have an apple?


  NANNY: No, you can’t. Apples at this time of night. Apples don’t grow on trees you know. (She has a drink from a bottle.)

  BOY: What’s that?

  NANNY: That’s Nanny’s medicine.

  BOY: What for?

  NANNY: It’s for Nanny’s leg. Nanny’s got a bone in her leg.

  BOY: Can I have some for my leg?

  NANNY: No, you can’t. Going out without your wellies on, do you wonder you get pains in your legs. You go out without your wellies on, you’ll go blind. That’s why St Paul went blind. Went out on the Damascus Road without his wellies on. See, did I say no? Lie down this minute. If I have another muff out of you there’ll be ructions. Give us a kiss. Kisses make babies grow. Night, night, sleep tight. God bless and go to sleep or the policeman’ll come and cut your little tail off.

  RADIO: The hour has come when we are to be put to the test, as the innocent people of Holland and Belgium and France are being tested already. And with our united strength and with unshakeable courage fight and work until this wild beast that has sprung out of his lair upon us shall be finally disarmed and overthrown.

  (SKINNER and TUPPER are pulling faces, mocking the note of rather ludicrous ferocity with which Chamberlain delivers this speech, FRANKLIN, who is listening to the speech as HUGH, catches sight of them, strides across and hits SKINNER.)

  FRANKLIN: This may be ancient history to you, Skinner, but to your mother and father it spelled life and death.

  RADIO: In those circumstances my duty was plain. I sought an audience of the King this evening and tendered to him my resignation, which His Majesty was pleased to accept.

  HUGH: Never be Prime Minister at the start of a war, Nursie.

  NURSIE: Hmm. Some of us have got better things to do. Good riddance to bad rubbish, that’s what I say. Here, you’re not doing anything for the war effort, wind this. (She hands him a hank of wool to hold.)

  HUGH: It’s always the same. Asquith, the Younger Pitt, their hearts not in it. The man who’s led you into it isn’t the one to lead you out of it.

  (MOGGIE enters in WVS uniform.)

  MOGGIE: Chamberlain, Chamberlain, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children all gone. Still I always had a soft spot for him. And what has Churchill done? He’s just a trouble maker. Why couldn’t they have Halifax?