Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Though like conscience it is something you might have been happier without, shyness saves you – and this is a big plus in my mother’s eyes – saves you from being ‘common’, which is in many ways its antithesis, involving self-advertisement, self-display and a degree of groundless pushing yourself forward and attention-seeking that is the opposite of shy. Though what this disparagement of common doesn’t take into account is that people who are common in my mother’s terms are often funny and make you laugh, if only because they are readily on tap and don’t have to be drawn out or made allowances for, and generally handled with care – the common Toad, I suppose, always more fun than the shy Badger.

  Part of shy is ‘always having your nose in a book’, which in our house is no offence at all, though library books, which is generally what they are, are thought by my mother to carry contagion, TB and scarlet fever particularly, and so are not to be read in bed. But as time goes on I begin to see that the perils of books are the least of it, and that shyness has its own risks and its own incumbencies.

  Shy at sixteen, for instance, means that I am happy (or prevailable, anyway) to accompany my mother on holiday long after my contemporaries are going off on expeditions of their own, or having tea and toasted teacakes in a café when I ought to have been venturing into pubs. Shy means taking Mam’s arm as a surrogate Dad and being a makeshift companion.

  ‘He’s shy,’ she would explain, ‘but not with me.’

  Or, as it later comes out (in A Chip in the Sugar):

  ‘You’re my boyfriend, aren’t you, Graham?’ Mam said, and she put her arm through mine.

  Shy is also useful to someone shy of saying (or thinking) something else. Though my mother was the only girl my father ever went out with, and he her only boyfriend, and both are in that sense shy, the word when it is applied to me does not quite mean that. At a time when explanations are seldom sought, stigmas attached or categories imposed, shy is all that needs to be said; it means, is a nice way of saying, seemingly not interested in the opposite sex and being put off by girls; not shy of girls in general (I wasn’t) but shy about them in one particular. So shy then is a cover, an excuse, a label that avoids saying something so unsayable (and shy-making) that Mam and particularly Dad prefer not even to think about it. In the event they do not have much to worry about because, though shy excludes me from the world of men (and therefore of women), it is not in itself a passport to the alternative: shy with one sex does not mean bold with the other. Nowadays, of course, when coming out is more common, shy is often just what such a boy is not, ‘I wish he was bloody shy’ a father’s likely comment.

  The perils of shyness are likely to persist, be lifelong … though happily not in my case. There is the risk of never managing to leave home, for instance, which I achieve finally at the age of thirty. Or if the father dies and the mother is left, the shy one, being unmarried, is the one likely to be called on as her companion. I am lucky in that I only come in for a year or so of that, the risk of being an unmarried son carrying the same penalties as being an unmarried daughter, the unmarriedness meaning that they must pay the price of not leaving home by being the companion and ending up a man of forty, who keeps his money in a purse, wears a raincoat too tightly belted and a neatly folded scarf, and who invariably writes out a shopping list. That is shy, careful, set in its ways, denizen of tea shops and haunter of libraries … a fate I see vividly as almost mine, and not always a fate either.

  Shy is a gentle word – soft, blurred but sometimes murderous. I recall a film with Eric Portman as the loving son of a doting mother with whom he lives; his evenings (I think it had to do with the moon) given over to rape and murder. He is shy, though he keeps the newspaper cuttings to do with his crimes in his bedroom drawer, which his mother is shy of opening.

  ‘He kept himself to himself ’ is what neighbours say of such figures, which is a way of saying shy after the event, the event all too often a murder or an abduction, a shattering of shy.

  Shy has other, less dramatic, misprisions, particularly when you are young; it does not stop you being prurient, for instance, as I was, though you are thought the worse of should you be found out because being shy makes you seem like a hypocrite.

  Shy means, too, that there are always people – and not merely PT instructors or drill sergeants – who see their role in life as shelling you from shy, the shelling both a bombardment and a splitting of your protective covering, to leave you blushing and exposed. It goes with a special kind of joviality. Doctors have it, a certain type of schoolmaster, and vicars even, coming at you with a heartiness that seems to me always without heart. They call it ‘getting you out of your shell’ and can mean it kindly, though it seldom works with me, my skin too thin, my shell too thick. Shyness invites interference, though, because it seems an evasion, an opacity with the real self occluded. It would have helped had I known all this at the time; instead of which, I think it’s ‘just me’. It would have helped, too, if I had seen the drawbacks of being shy earlier than I eventually do, and seen how it could mean missing out on a lot of fun – and I don’t just mean sex (though I do mean sex).

  It’s another handicap when, just before I’m eighteen, I take to wearing glasses. Even at the time I know this is a kind of capitulation, an admission that I am or have settled for being a shy and spectacled sort of man. Glasses fit my face; they are an emblem, a tortoiseshell badge, a visible declaration that this is the kind of person I have decided to seem.

  It isn’t altogether a candid declaration, as a donnish figure in glasses isn’t really what I feel like at all, and some of the next twenty-five years will be spent trying to unseem it. But my glasses are a defence and a disguise, an emplacement from behind which I can survey the world.

  Actually I can see pretty well without them, except at the cinema or the theatre, and should have kept them exclusively for that. But I am lazy, and prescribed them only for distances I soon begin to wear them all the time so that they become part of me. Unless I’m wearing my glasses I scarcely seem to exist and my face falls apart. I note that on those pretty rare occasions when I go to bed with someone I take off all my clothes before finally I take off my glasses and become unspectacled again; the real nakedness comes last.

  It is shortly after I start to wear glasses that I am called up, and though the next two years don’t put paid to ‘shy’, I don’t quite turn out to be the young man I thought I was going to be. Certainly as I get older I set less store by shyness and begin to see it as the burden it is, just as do my parents. In due course, too, their attitude broadens and the opposite of shy, namely common, invites less censure, with the judgement qualified or even quashed if being common happens to go with generosity and being good-hearted or even just a good laugh.

  The comedienne, Hylda Baker, is common, hilariously so, overdressed, under-educated and unashamed of it, both on stage and off, pictured once in the Evening Post driving through Leeds in an open limousine with a monkey on a gold chain and a fetching young chauffeur in much the same position.

  But of course Hylda Baker is safely on stage and it’s in order for Mam and Dad to laugh at her. But they are the same about someone not unlike Hylda Baker, Russell Harty’s mother Myrtle. Everything about the Harty family – dog, decorations, car, bath – is all dead-centre common, a natural hazard, I suppose, of successful greengrocery and a life spent in the covered market. But because she is kind and a good sort, and her torpid husband likewise, Myrtle’s commonness does not enter into it, just as it never does with Russell himself, who can have Mam and Dad helpless with laughter at remarks which, coming from anyone else and myself in particular, would have been labelled ‘cheeky’ or ‘suggestive’ and had Dad in particular shrinking with embarrassment.

  Russell’s shock-horror exposure in the tabloids, and the so-called revelations about his sex life, come long after my father is dead and my mother is incapable, but if they’d still been around they might well have just shrugged it off. Dad certainly wouldn’t have
wanted him to stop coming round, as it would put an end to him playing his violin with Russell on the piano. But had there been similar revelations involving me, I could not have hoped to get off so lightly.

  ‘We don’t understand it. You’ve always been so shy.’

  TOAD: Ratty, may I present the gaoler’s daughter who single-handed effected my escape from prison.

  GAOLER’S DAUGHTER: Oh Toady, you little love.

  (She kisses him. And just as Toad wanted to initiate Rat into the charms of caravanning, so now he wants to introduce him to the delights of kissing.)

  TOAD: Ratty kicked the weasels out of Toad Hall. I think he deserves a kiss, too.

  RAT: No, no. Please. (Rat is most reluctant but she manages to kiss him.) Oh. I say. That’s not unpleasant. I think my friend Mole might like that. Moley. Try this. (So Mole gets a kiss too, and perhaps his kiss is longer and more lingering.) What do you think?

  MOLE: Mmmmm. Yes.

  RAT: Yes. I think one could get quite used to it.

  (The Wind in the Willows, stage adaptation)

  And so it went on; I was generally in love, always unhappily, always with my own sex, and seldom with any physical outcome. I was still a medieval historian, not a profession, I imagine, with a high sexual strike rate. But by this time I was also in Beyond the Fringe, and whereas I might be quite near the sexual average for a medieval historian, for a performer in a smash hit West End show I must have been well below it. To translate the currency of theatrical success into sexual favours ought to have been easy (two of my colleagues did it with ease), but with me it remains strictly non-negotiable.

  I have occasional flings, all of them straight, two of them with the same slightly depressing outcomes; shortly after going to bed with me, my partners announce their engagement (to someone else) and are briskly married. It is as if I had served as a reminder of the horrors of single life; properly marketed, I might have had a future bringing dithering girls to the point of matrimony.

  It is said that blonds have more fun, and around the time I am stampeding these unfortunate girls into marriage David Hockney is dyeing his hair on that assumption. I have to say, though, that more fun was not, and has not been, my experience. To be tall is not a big plus either in my view, favourite, as lighting cameramen say, to be dark and of middle height.

  All through my teens my dreams are seldom of happiness or fulfilment, but more often of transcendence. I never realistically expect that the loved one, if made aware of my affection, is likely to return it in kind, but I am comforted instead by some notion that I will rise above this and go on to greater things. Not vastly greater; the place I get at Cambridge in December 1951 comes in this category, as does the scholarship to Oxford two years later; the pride I take in both made keener because they must come to the chosen one’s notice.

  Making people laugh is another move in this game of transcendence, and sustains me through cabarets at Oxford and much of Beyond the Fringe, though my dwindling urge to perform thereafter coincides with the discovery that the satisfactions of sex, however sparse, are more worthwhile than the dubious rewards of rising above it.

  I am now well into my twenties, not far off thirty in fact, and I feel I stand in much the same relation to the sexual life as Wilfred Thesiger did to the desert. Thesiger could traverse vast tracts of sand with little more than a swig of water and a few dates. In much the same way, I could go for months, years indeed, on virtually no dates at all. No quarter could have been emptier than my twenties.

  Of course, to admit to sexual unsuccess, to admit to unsuccess of any sort perhaps, is to commend oneself to one’s audience, at any rate in England. Philip Larkin’s famous assertion that sexual intercourse began in 1963, and that this was just too late for him, did much to endear him to his readers. There can be few of us, after all, who don’t feel that we were to some extent behind the door when sex was handed out, or that we have not had our proper ration, whatever that is. And if there was some disenchantment with Larkin after his death, or after the publication of his life, it was partly because it rapidly became plain that Larkin’s poem, however true, was not frank and that far from missing the sexual boat in 1963, Larkin and his various girlfriends had been at it like knives on both sides of the year in question; and indeed had probably had a rather better time of it than many of his previously sympathetic readers.

  Much of my sexual history is implicit in Habeas Corpus (1973), a farce which rings with cries (or wails) from the heart such as Canon Throbbing’s:

  My life I squandered waiting Then let my chance go by.

  But as often happens once put into words, the predicament alters. And after Habeas Corpus things take a turn for the better. Since it’s a play about sexual liberation, this might be thought to be a case of life imitating art. And this does happen with plays, though often for the more down-to-earth reason that it helps to get things out into the open/off one’s chest. Besides, the times were changing too, the seventies in my experience altogether easier in this regard than the more famous sixties.

  If my sexual life looks up in what I see as the nick of time, it’s partly too that as I get older I grow more light-minded. Having always thought of love as preceding sex, I now cease to care very much and so, I imagine, become easier to cope with. The young men I fall for are still straight, but sex in the seventies is not so particular about gender and boundaries, and so I find myself less often rebuffed and even having quite a nice time. And since one sex tends to lead to another, I also find myself being led back from the paths of deviancy to what becomes, in the eighties anyway, a pretty conventional life.

  Such loving and long-lasting friendships that I have had have generally begun with sex and permutated (I do not say blossomed) into love. This was not the way I was told it would, or should, happen, the conventional model (as held up by vicars, schoolmasters and the better class of novel) having sex as the prize awarded to love, not the means of achieving it.

  With sex, though, it’s possible to think that you have both had less than your share and also more than you deserve.

  There’s an echo of this (unnoticed by me when I wrote it) in The Madness of George III when the Queen, his ‘good little pudding’, wonders whether, had he led a normal life, George III might not have gone mad.

  KING: A normal life?

  QUEEN: Other women, sir.

  KING: Kicked over the traces, you mean, hey? No life is without its regrets. Yet none is without consolations. You are a good little woman, Mrs King. And we have been happy, have we not?

  A refinement of regret comes to me occasionally nowadays when boys who were at school with me, now of course retired, write with their memories of school. They are boys, some of them, whom I often thought unapproachable at the time, and whom I longed to know. And now, when I can, it is fifty years too late. I reply but make no plans to meet.

  If this account peters out just at the point when things are beginning to look up, this is not simply out of discretion or consideration for the other parties concerned, but because settling down, which is in effect what it was, is of less interest than the fairly parched route that took me there.

  In 1989 Ian McKellen hosted a charity concert in support of the abolition of Clause 28, the section of the Local Government Bill barring the supposed promotion (which actually included the discussion) of homosexuality in schools. Various playwrights were represented, notably Wilde, Rattigan, Orton and myself, with Joan Plowright performing an extract from one of my monologues. Wilde, Rattigan, Orton and myself might be thought to have only one thing in common, but although I was quite happy to rally the troops, I did feel (not that anyone much cared) that this was oversimplifying my own situation.

  I introduced the extract, saying that to enquire (as McKellen had done) if I was homosexual was like asking someone who had just crawled across the Sahara Desert whether they preferred Malvern or Perrier water. It was a good joke and got a big laugh, but at the time, at any rate, it seemed a fair statement of my sit
uation.

  Always a later starter, I must count myself blessed that, at a time in my fifties, when I expected to remain permanently unattached, I found, or was found by, a partner who, though much younger than I am, now shares my life. I can’t quite boast that it’s an ordinary life, or, my parents’ ambition, a life like other people’s. But it does for us.

  * The Works of John Ruskin, Vol. XIII (1904), edited by E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn.

  Seeing Stars

  In the 1940s within a mile or so of where we lived in Armley in Leeds there were at least half a dozen cinemas. Nearest was the Picturedrome on Wortley Road but others were just a walk or a tram-ride away – the Lyric down Tong Road, the Clifton at Bramley, the Palace off Stanningley Road and the Western a bit further on. And without ever being a dedicated filmgoer I could have graded them all from fleapit upwards in their degree of comfort and sophistication just as, a little later, I would be able to grade the neighbourhood churches in terms of high and low, many of the churches and cinemas since sharing a common fate, conversion to carpet warehouses, second-hand furniture marts and, nowadays, health clubs.

  Programmes changed twice a week and we generally went on a Monday and a Saturday. Comedies were best, particularly George Formby, but we took what was on offer, never knowing whether a film had any special merit. Some came with more of a reputation than others, Mrs Miniver for instance with Greer Garson, Dangerous Moonlight (with the Warsaw Concerto) and Now, Voyager with the famous cigarettes. But some didn’t; I must have seen Casablanca on its first time round with no notion that this was a film of a different order from the usual twice-weekly fare. It was only towards the end of the war that more of a fuss started to be made over forthcoming films, so that I remember reading in Picture Post (and probably at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.