by Alan Bennett
Dad’s brief excursion into leisurewear wasn’t an isolated occurrence but part of a process (Mam would have liked it to have been a programme) called ‘branching out’. The aim of ‘branching out’ was to be more like other people, or like what Mam imagined other people to be, an idea she derived in the first instance from women’s magazines and latterly from television. The world of coffee mornings, flower arrangement, fork lunches and having people round for drinks was never one my parents had been part of. Now that Mam was well again and Dad could drive, Mam’s modest social ambitions, long dormant, started to revive and she began to entertain the possibility of ‘being a bit more like other folks’. The possibility was all it was, though, and much to Dad’s relief, all that it remained.
‘It’s your Dad,’ Mam would complain. ‘He won’t mix. I’d like to, only he won’t.’
And there was no sense in explaining to her that these occasions she read about in Homes and Gardens were not all that they were cracked up to be, or if it came to the point she’d be nonplussed in company. Other people did it, why couldn’t we?
Drink would have helped but both my parents were teetotallers, though more from taste than conviction. Indeed alcohol had, for Mam at least, a certain romance, partly again to be put down to the cocktail parties she had read about in women’s magazines. She had never been to, still less given, a cocktail party, which explains why she could never get the pronunciation of the actual word right, invariably laying the stress on the final syllable, cocktail. What a cocktail was I am sure she had no idea. Russell Harty used to tell how when he was at Oxford he had invited Vivien Leigh round for drinks and she had asked for pink gin. Only having the plain stuff Russell sent a friend out to the nearest off-licence for a bottle of the pink variety. Mam would not have understood there was a joke here, and had she ever got round to giving a cocktail party she would probably have tried to buy a bottle of cocktails.
The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
They did, however, gather that sherry was a generally acceptable drink, so once they were settled down in the village they invested in a bottle, as a first move in the ‘branching out’ campaign.
‘Your Dad and me are going to start to mix,’ Mam wrote. ‘We’ve got some sherry in and we’ve got some peanuts too.’
Never having tasted the mysterious beverage, though, they lacked any notion of when it was appropriate and treated it as a round-the-clock facility. Thus the vicar, calling with the Free Will offering envelope, was startled to be offered a sweet sherry at 10 o’clock in the morning. They, of course, stuck to tea; or, when they were trying to fit in, Ribena.
‘Well,’ said Mam resignedly, ‘it doesn’t do for us. Our Kathleen used to put it in the trifle and it always rifted up on me.’
On another occasion when they had actually been asked out to drinks and gone in great trepidation Mam rang up in some excitement.
‘Your Dad and me have found an alcoholic drink that we really like. It’s called bitter lemon.’
Nor was it merely the drink at cocktail parties my mother found mysterious, but the food that was on offer there too – cocktail snacks, bits of cheese and pineapple, sausages-on-sticks, food that nowadays would come under the generic term of nibbles. Now sausages were not unknown in our house: my father had been a butcher after all, we took them in our stride. But a sausage had only to be hoisted onto a stick to become for my mother an emblem of impossible sophistication.
With these notions it’s hardly surprising they never made the social round or lived the kind of model life my mother used to read about in magazines. They put it down, as they did most of their imagined shortcomings, to their not having been educated, education to them a passport to everything they lacked: self-confidence, social ease and above all the ability to be like other people. Every family has a secret and the secret is that it’s not like other families. My mother imagined that every family in the kingdom except us sat down together to a cooked breakfast, that when the man of the house had gone off to work and the children to school there was an ordered programme of washing, cleaning, baking and other housewifely tasks, interspersed with coffee mornings and (higher up the social scale) cocktail parties. What my parents never really understood was that most families just rubbed along anyhow.
A kind of yearning underlay both their lives. Before they moved to the village, my father’s dream was of a smallholding (always referred to as such). He saw himself keeping hens, a goat, and growing his own potatoes; an idyll of self-sufficiency.
I was in Holland not long ago, where along every railway line and on any spare bit of urban land were hundreds of neat plots, which were not allotments so much as enclosed gardens, each with a hut, a pavilion almost, outside which the largely elderly owners were sunbathing (some of them virtually naked). Dad would never have gone in for that, but I think, though less cheek by jowl, this was just what he meant by a smallholding. It was a dream, of course, of a generation older than his, a vision of the soldiers who survived the First World War, with Surrey, Essex and Kent full of rundown chicken farms, the sad relics of those days.
Dad had no social ambitions, such aspirations as he did have confined to playing his violin better. He read a good deal, though there was never a bookshelf in the living room and all the books in the house were kept in my room, Mam’s view being that books not so much furnished a room as untidied it. What books they had of their own were kept in the sideboard, most of them even at this late stage in their lives to do with self-improvement: How to Improve Your Memory Power, In Tune with the Infinite, Relax Your Way to Health! After Dad died my brother and I went to collect his belongings from the hospital – his bus pass, a few toffees he’d had in his pocket, and in his wallet a cutting from a newspaper: ‘Cure Bronchitis in a Week! Deep Breathing the Only Answer’.
‘We’re neither of us anything in the mixing line. We were when we were first married, but you lose the knack.’
‘Anyway, I don’t see what God has to do with mixing. Too much God and it puts the tin hat on it.’
This is an exchange from Say Something Happened, a TV play of mine about an oldish couple visited by a young social worker who is worried by their isolation. It never got to the social worker stage with Mam and Dad, but certainly they kept to themselves more and more as they got older and as Mam’s depressions became more frequent. Besides, everything was social. They stopped going to church because all too often they got roped in after the service to take part in a discussion group.
‘It was a talk on the Third World,’ Dad wrote to me. ‘Well, your Mam and me don’t even know where the Third World is. Next week it’s Buddhism. We’re going to give it a miss.’
Small talk, Buddhism, sausages-on-sticks, like the second name he did not want Gordon to have, they were for other people, not for them.
With Mam, though, the dream of sociability persisted. When, after Dad died, she went to live with my brother, I was clearing out the kitchen cupboard, and there behind an old bottle of Goodall’s Vanilla Essence and a half-empty packet of Be-Ro Self-Raising Flour I came across a sad little tube of cocktail sticks.
Put simply and as they themselves would have put it, both my parents were shy, a shortcoming they thought of as an affliction while at the same time enshrining it as a virtue. Better to be shy, however awkward it made you feel, than be too full of yourself and always shoving yourself forward.
It may have been shyness that drew my parents together in the first place; my mother was shy as her sisters were not and my father was the least outgoing of his brothers. The early morning wedding at St Bartholomew’s, Armley, was a ceremony for a couple shy of ceremony, so it’s not surprising if in the years that followed a premium was put on shy and it became our badge.
Half of Dad’s morality came out of his shyness, reinforcing as
it did the modesty of his expectations while resigning him to the superior enterprise and good fortune of others.
‘Your Dad won’t push himself forward,’ Mam would say, ‘that’s his trouble.’ That it was her trouble too was not the point; she was a woman, after all. Thus he seldom got angry and, too shy to tell anybody off, just ‘felt sickened’. Regularly cheated or done down in business, he never became hardened to it or came by a philosophy to cope, other than doing imitations of the people he disliked, longing to give them ‘Joe Fitton’s remedy’* or just being funny generally. But he chafed against a temperament that made him much liked by everyone except himself, and it’s not surprising that, suppressing his real feelings, he was a martyr to stomach trouble, a complaint, along with the shyness, he has bequeathed to me.
Shyness (which will keep cropping up in this book) is a soft word, foggy and woollen, and it throws its blanket over all sorts of behaviour. It covers a middle-aged son or neurasthenic daughter living at home with an elderly mother, through to some socially crippled and potentially dangerous creature incapable of human response; shy a spectrum that stretches from the wallflower to the psychopath. ‘A bit of a loner’ is how the tabloids put it after some shrinking wreck has ventured to approach or make off with a child or exposed himself in a park, ‘shy’ thought altogether too kindly a description. Because ‘soft’ comes near it, and ‘timid’, too, but without the compassion or understanding implicit in shy. That he or she is shy is an excuse or an extenuation that is made by others (mothers in particular) but seldom by the persons concerned. Because if you are shy then you’re generally too shy to say so, ‘I’m shy’ a pretty bold thing to come out with.
Sheltering under shy, it was a long time before I understood that the self-effacing and the self-promoting, shy and its opposite, share a basic assumption, shy and forward the same. Everybody is looking at me, thinks the shy person (and I wish they weren’t). Everybody is looking at me, thinks the self-confident (and quite right too). I learned this lesson in time to be able to point it out, probably rather sententiously, to my parents, but it was too late for them, and the other lesson I had learned, that to be shy was to be a bit of a bore, they knew already, to their cost. I assured them, falsely, that everybody felt much as they did but that social ease was something that could and should be faked.
‘Well, you can do that,’ Dad would say, ‘you’ve been educated,’ adding how often he felt he had nothing to contribute. ‘I’m boring, I think. I can’t understand why anybody likes us. I wonder sometimes whether they do, really.’
I found this heartbreaking because it wasn’t said with an eye to being told the opposite. It was genuinely how they thought of themselves.
Left out of this account are all their jokes and fun, the pleasure they got out of life and their sheer silliness. After retirement they both put on weight, and coming in one day I found them sitting side by side on the sofa. ‘Here were are,’ said Dad, ‘Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’
Dad had always been shy about sex, never talking about it directly and disapproving of any reference to it by us as children or even of Mam’s occasional ‘cheeky’ remark. I was used to this and respected it, except that I was not immune to some of the modish stuff talked about mental illness in the seventies and at some point on one of the long drives to and from the hospital I heard myself asking my father if he touched my mother enough. He was too embarrassed to reply, ‘Nay, Alan’ all that he’d commit himself to, the implication being what business was it of mine. And he was quite right. Who was I to ask what amount of touching went on, who at that time had touched and was touching virtually no one at all? It might have been better, more acceptable as a question, had I said hugging rather than touching, but hugging as a manifestation of (often unfeeling) affection had not yet achieved the currency it did in the eighties and nineties when it often served to demonstrate that other loveless construct, caring. The thought of myself putting the question at all makes me wince in retrospect, but how should I ask about hugging when I knew, as he did, that none of our family were great huggers, though no less affectionate for that.
Dad would have been shy to have been seen embracing Mam, but when I put to him the unnecessary question about touching he could, unthinkably, have retorted that, though it was nothing to do with me, at seventy he still was actually touching Mam when and where it mattered. This emerged a year or two later, in 1974, when he was lying in Intensive Care in the same Airedale Hospital recovering, as we were assured, from a heart attack. Mam had only just been discharged from the same hospital and was at home coming round after yet another bout of depression. Dazed by her own illness and stunned by his, she lay in bed talking about Dad, sometimes, as was not uncommon when she was poorly, taking me for him. Out of the blue she suddenly said,
‘He does very well, you know, your Dad.’
‘Yes,’ I said, taking this for a general statement.
‘No. I mean for a fellow of seventy-one.’
Again I did not twig.
‘Why?’
‘Well, you know when we were in Leeds he had to have that little operation to do with his water. Well, most fellers can’t carry on much after that. But it didn’t make any difference to your Dad. He does very well.’
Had I known it, the pity was all in the tense, since his doing, however well, was now almost done, and he died a few days later.
‘It was only on Tuesday he drove us over to Morecambe,’ said Mam. ‘It was miserable all day, only it fined up at tea time so we thought we’d have a run-out. Will it be all the driving to the hospital that’s done it?’
I said I didn’t think so, though I did.
‘We went up to the West End by the golf course. I wanted a bit of a walk on the sands but we’d only been going a minute when he said, “Nay, Mam, you’ll have to stop. I can’t go no further.” It must have been coming on then.’
I knew exactly the place where they would have been walking. It was up towards Bare, the suburb of Morecambe always thought ‘a bit more select’. We had walked on the same sands often, particularly during the war, when all our seaside holidays seemed to be taken at Morecambe. For Dad they were scarcely a holiday at all, as with no one to stand in for him at the Coop he never managed more than a couple of days, a break so short it was always overshadowed by the grief-stricken leave-taking with which it invariably concluded. The sadness of these partings ought to have been comic, though it never seemed so. Having seen him off on the train the three of us would walk on the empty evening sands as the sun set across the bay, and Mam wept and wept. For what? They were only to be separated four or five days at the most, and Dad wasn’t going back to the front but to dreary old Leeds, which seldom even ran to an air raid. It was love, I suppose, and the loneliness of a week with her two uncomforting boys.
So that these sands, where once she had wept so bitterly and grieved so needlessly, should now be the setting for their last walk together seems, if not fitting, then at least symmetrical, the disproportionate grief then finding its appropriate object forty years later, the equation complete.
Afterwards I came to think I might have been in some degree responsible, and that Dad’s death was my doing if not my fault. Already written in 1974, though not filmed, was my second TV play, Sunset Across the Bay, where I had included a scene in which a retired couple say farewell to their son, who is going off to Australia. I set the goodbye on that same stretch of Morecambe sand before, in a later scene, killing off the father with a stroke in a seafront lavatory. The couple in the play have retired to Morecambe from Leeds and were not unlike my parents, except that whereas in the play their lives are lonely and unhappy and their expectations from retirement unfulfilled, Mam and Dad’s retirement, even with Mam’s depression, was one of the happiest times of their lives. We made the film that autumn, by which time Dad was three months dead, his first heart attack one Saturday morning in August 1974, the second a week later killing him.
Anyone who writes will be familiar with
the element of involuntary prediction that informs the imagination; one writes about something, and if it does not exactly happen a version of it does. Sometimes, when one is writing about oneself, for instance, there is an objective explanation; it was only after writing a play that dealt, albeit farcically, with sexual inhibition that my own sex life picked up, the play a form of crude psychotherapy, ‘getting it out of your system’ (or ‘off your chest’) another way of putting it.
That by writing a play about the death of a father I brought on the death of my own is perhaps fanciful, though the thought certainly occurred. But there were other, less notional ways, too, in which I may have contributed to his dying.
The heart attack had not been without warning, but all attention, Dad’s included, had been so concentrated on Mam’s situation and her recurring depressions that his own failing health went unconsidered, at any rate by me, and he, typically, said nothing on the phone. Or did he? Maybe I didn’t want to hear.
I had been taking the journey north less often than previously because I was acting in Habeas Corpus in the West End, the only way to get home to drive up on the Sunday and back on the Monday, so if I was neglecting my duties there was some excuse. Still, it was an excuse, and the truth was I was reluctant to be away from London even for a night because I was having a nice time, and what was more, knew it. I was ‘living’ as one of the characters in another play describes it, the play being Intensive Care, in which a father has a heart attack and his son sits at his hospital bedside in order to be with him when he dies, but at the crucial moment is not with his father but in bed with a nurse. I am not I and he is not he, but I could see where that play, written six years later, came from.
I had always been a late starter and aged forty, and in the nick of time as it seemed to me then, I had caught up with that sexual revolution which, so Philip Larkin (who was not a reliable witness) claimed, had begun a decade earlier. While sexual intercourse did not quite begin in 1974 it was certainly the year when sex was available pretty much for the asking … or maybe I had just learned the right way to ask. Whatever the reason, I suddenly seemed to be leading the kind of life I was told everybody else had been leading for years. I had at last, as they say, got it together. It was at this point my father died and I was summarily banished from London, where such things were possible, to live with my mother in Yorkshire, where they were not.