Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  9 May. Vanity: my sixty-second birthday. Someone behind me in M&S says: ‘Are you all right, young man?’ I look round.

  11 May. On the Leeds train the conductor announces: ‘The trolley will shortly be coming through with a selection of hot and cold snacks, tea and coffee and other beverages. For your information, pushing the trolley this morning is Miss Castleford 1996.’ And Miss Castleford duly comes through, though hardly the busty, brazen apparition one expected, but a rather quiet, shy-looking girl who, not surprisingly, is covered in confusion and fed up at having to cope with the jokes of the bolder passengers. Or customers, as we now are.

  16 May. Classic FM continues to irritate. Tonight we have a recording of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, the gap between Parts One and Two filled with various promotions (‘The haunting music of the Pan pipes’). Gerontius having achieved death, his soul begins its journey to judgement, lucky, I suppose, not to be seen off with a cheerful message from Henry Kelly. With it being Gerontius I’m surprised the whole thing isn’t a plug for Saga’s ‘specialised insurance for those of fifty and over’.

  Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to a minimum, isn’t wearingly cheerful and has some specialised knowledge, lightly worn, i.e. he is like an announcer on Radio 3. Most of the others are scarcely past the stage where they snigger at foreign names.

  17 May. Despite the vindication of the National Gallery in the filmed restoration of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, the cleaning controversy rumbles on. One misconception that fogs the argument is to do with the nature of time. Michael Daley, the NG’s chief critic, represents time as a benevolent mellowing process whereby paintings grow old gracefully, their colours maturing, the tints changing, but all at the same rate and in the same fashion, so that the composition arrives in the present day, veiled a little perhaps but still much as the artist intended. This is, of course, nonsense. Paintings more often than not have quite violent and eventful lives; they are loved, after all, and so naturally they get interfered with and touched up and, their admirers being fickle, when they get to seem a little old-fashioned they are dressed up a bit to suit the taste of the time. They limp into the present coated with centuries of make-up but still trying to keep body and soul together. ‘Mellowing’ is just not the word.

  19 May. Come out this morning (still grey, still cold) to find smack in front of my door a fish – a wet fish actually, about nine inches long, still glistening as if just caught. Pinkish in parts (a mullet?) dropped by a seagull perhaps or hurled into the garden by a dissatisfied customer? Except that the wet fish shop in Camden High Street has long ago been ousted by yet another emporium selling leather jackets. Anyway, a fish. I leave it for a while to see if it catches a gull’s eye, then put it in the bin.

  24 May. Run into Frank Dickens the cartoonist walking down the stalled escalator at Camden Town tube. Says that in Bristow, his strip in the Standard, he’s about to introduce the concept of Desk Rage, with frenzied attacks on other people in the office. About the same age as me, he still cycles but not as sedately as I do: Frank goes racing cycling and even wears Lycra shorts. He has several bikes, and when someone else in his club admired one of them and offered to buy it, Frank made him a present of it. When they were out cycling next, the young man to whom he had given the bike kept just behind him, mile after mile, until Frank slowed down and waved him on, whereupon the young man streaked away into the distance far faster than Frank could go. Afterwards he asked him why it had taken him so long to pass and the young man said: ‘Well, I did-n’t feel it was right to pass you on your own bike.’ The existence of such an unmapped social area and the delicacy required to negotiate it would have delighted Erving Goffman.

  31 May, Chichester. The city has streets and streets of immaculate seventeenth-and eighteenth-century houses, particularly round Pallant House; they’re manicured and swept clean and at night are as empty as a stage set. It’s quiet too, except (and this is a feature of English country towns) in the distance one suddenly hears whooping and shouting and the sound of running feet as young drunks somewhere make their presence felt and kick out against this oppressive idyll.

  1 June. When Jeremy Sams directed Wind in the Willows in Tokyo he had many practical problems, chief of which being that the actors did not trouble to make themselves heard. He was well into rehearsals before he found out that this was because they were all miked, as actors generally are in Japan. Another dilemma was almost philosophical: the cast were anxious to know about other characters like their own – other Moles, for instances, other Toads. ‘But there are no others,’ explained Jeremy. This the actors were unable to grasp or the fact that Wind in the Willows was not a type of English play and that there was no other with which it could be compared. All the plays in Japanese theatres are genre plays, variations on a theme or set of themes; the idea that a play might be unique seemed to them very strange indeed.

  27 June, Chichester. Talking to Maggie Smith about the number of grey heads in the audience for Talking Heads, I compare them with a field of dandelion clocks. She says that she’s read or been told that the Warwickshire folk name for these was ‘chimney-sweeps’ so that Shakespeare’s ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ is thus explained. I had always taken chimney-sweepers to be a straightforward antithesis, poor and dirty boys and girls the opposite of clean and bronzed ones. This, of course, doesn’t bear close examination, though what probably planted it in my mind was a nightmare I used regularly to have as a child in which a chimney-sweep or coalman rampaged through our spotless house. I look up chimney-sweeps in Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora (shamefully out of print) and find that, the flowers being black and dusty, chimney-sweep and chimney-sweeper are Warwickshire slang for the plantain, particularly the ribwort, and that these were used to bind up sheaves of hay; children, whether golden or otherwise, used to play a game not unlike conkers with the flowers on their long stems, in the course of which, presumably, the flowers disintegrated, or came to dust.

  1 July. Watch Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which was shot in England, the Isle of Dogs doubling for Vietnam. It’s remarkable chiefly for the language of the Marine instructor, a wonderfully written and terrible part, which takes language into areas certainly undescribed in 1987, when it was made, and not often since. For example: ‘You’re the kind of guy who’d fuck someone up the ass and not do them the courtesy of a reach-around.’

  3 July. Silly programme on Timewatch last night attempting to rehabilitate Haig. (‘Acid-bath Haig?’ ‘No. Blood-bath Haig.’) It was just historians playing see-saw with no new evidence forthcoming and no examination of the sources, his diaries, for instance, treated as trustworthy when it’s pretty certain Haig rewrote them to fit in with his version of events. If the fact that he never visited the actual Front was the only count against him it would be sufficient to condemn him. But how like a man not wanting to see the suffering lest he be upset. People always complain about muck-raking biographers, saying: ‘Leave us our heroes.’ ‘Leave us our villains’ is just as important.

  4 July. In the evening go across the road to the newly empty No. 55 for a kind of book fair. Francis Hope died in the Paris air-crash in 1974; pressed for space, his widow Mary Hope is now, twenty-two years later, disposing of his books and has asked some of his friends round for a glass of wine and to take away whatever they might want. It’s an odd occasion, the sort of thing that might kick off a novel, with a group of middle-aged friends revisiting their youth and remembering some of the books they read then. There’s Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/wear these?’

  I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David Winn, an Etonian contemporary of Francis who also died young.

  26 August. Do not renew my subscription to the Friends of
Regent’s Park, one of whose aims seems to be to enforce the regulations against cycling in the Park. Ten years ago A. was fined £25 for riding her bike to the tennis courts at 7.30 in the morning, a piece of officiousness that could only happen in England. I have always thought that if the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Edinburgh meant what they say about the environment they’d long ago have put their weight behind a cycle track through the Park. Now it’s out of their hands as the Park is run by some private concern which would, I’m sure, be only too happy to put a cycle track across the Park provided they could charge for the use of it.

  1 October. I have just finished reading A Passionate Prodigality by Guy Chapman, one of the books belonging to Francis Hope that I picked up in the summer. From its less than snappy title it would be hard to guess what the book is about and this perhaps explains why, so far as I’m aware, it has no reputation. Originally published in 1933, it is Chapman’s account of his experiences in the First War, when he served as a young subaltern from July 1915 right through until 1920, ending up in the Army of Occupation in Germany. It’s one of the best accounts of the trenches I’ve read, with Chapman, despite himself, falling in love with his platoon and their life together much as Wilfred Owen did. He went on to become a professor of history at Leeds, where he married the novelist Storm Jameson, and thinking about it, I realise he must have taught the man who taught me history at school, H. H. Hill. So exhilarated have I been by the book, I find myself absurdly pleased at the connection.

  17 October. Lunch in a restaurant in Chelsea with Maggie Smith and Beverley Cross. As Bev is paying the bill the proprietor murmurs that General Pinochet is lunching, as indeed he is, just round the corner from our table, though not quite within spitting distance. It’s a table for eight or so, Pinochet with his back to the window, which might seem foolhardy except that in the first room of the restaurant there are three fairly obvious bodyguards, who scrutinise Bev and me carefully as we come out (and particularly, for some reason, my shoes). There’s also a table nearby with four big young men, who might be heavies or might be businessmen, the fact that one can’t tell maybe saying something about both. I cause the bodyguards some unease after Maggie comes out saying that sitting at an adjoining table had been Don Bachardy, so I go back in and have a word, last having seen him with Christopher Isherwood thirty-five years ago. Then he was an olive-skinned doe-eyed boy who came round and did a drawing of me. Now he looks exactly as Isherwood did, even down to the little schoolboy sprout of hair at the back.

  Apropos Pinochet, anybody brought up on Hollywood films of the forties would know instantly he was a villain. Distinguished, grey-haired and seemingly genial, he is the image of those crooked lawyers, ostensibly pillars of the community, who turned out to be the brains behind the local rackets and vice rings. They were played by actors like Edward Arnold, Thurston Hall or Otto Kruger; rich, kindly, avuncular figures, they deceived everyone in the film but nobody in the audience, who were not at all surprised to see them taken away at the end, snarling with impotent fury. Not so General Pinochet and his cronies, tucking into their fish this October afternoon, the murmur of polite conversation drowning the screams from the cellar.

  25 October. A figure (often of fun) who keeps cropping up in memoirs of the Second War such as those of Nancy Mitford and James Lees-Milne is Stuart Preston, nicknamed the Sergeant, an American serviceman who came over to work at US HQ in London, later taking part in the invasion. He seems to have very rapidly become a feature of the upper-class English social scene, setting hearts of both sexes aflutter. Lees-Milne notes (Friday, 2 April 1943) how Preston once came to see him off at Euston; Lees-Milne was actually going to Preston but he doesn’t make anything of the coincidence. What happened to the Sergeant? Did he go back to America? Is he still around? Certainly his memories of that period would be interesting.*

  Being seen off for Preston by someone called Preston reminds me of a party given for Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy by Robin and Francis Hope in their flat in Goodge Street in the sixties. As the doorbell rang, Robin saw to his horror that there was on the table a bottle of Bacardi rum, which he whisked away just in time. It was only afterwards that he found himself unable to analyse or locate the faux pas that he thought he had narrowly avoided making. Why would it have mattered?

  7 November. To Whitemoor High Security Prison near March in Cambridgeshire, March that fogbound halt where I used to change en route from Leeds to Cambridge forty-five years ago. That station has gone now and the prison is built over what once were the marshalling yards, the ground too saturated in mineral waste for much else. Not that this makes it very different from the surrounding countryside, as that’s pretty thoroughly polluted too, all hedges gone, the soil soused in fertiliser, a real Fison’s Fen. And it goes on: as I have my sandwiches by a raddled copse, two tractors in tandem ply up and down a vast field, conscientiously soaking the soil with yet another spray. From a distance the prison might be an out-of-town shopping mall, Texas Homecare, Do It All and Toys ’R’ Us. There’s a crèche at the gate and a Visitors’ Centre, as it might be for Fountains Abbey or Stonehenge. Reasoning that I am a visitor myself, I battle across the windswept car park but when I put my head inside I find it full of visitors of a different sort, the wives and mothers (and very much the children) of the inmates, Birds of a Feather territory, I suppose. At the gate proper I’m frisked, X-rayed, my handprints taken, and am then taken through a series of barred gates and sliding doors every bit as intimidating as the institution in The Silence of the Lambs. The education officer says that this is just the outer prison and that at the heart of it is an even more secure compound, the one from which some IRA prisoners escaped a couple of years ago. It’s oppressively bleak and intimidating, the odd flower bed or shrubbery emphasising how soulless it is. It could be a business park or a warehouse at an airport – Brinks Mat, I imagine, something like this.

  While the prisoners are brought down I wait in a little common room with one or two instructors and interested parties: a blind boy who teaches maths; Anne Hunt, who has been seconded from UEA; and another teacher who has come over from Blundeston Prison near Lowestoft to hear the talk. Which is actually no talk at all, as the prisoners rather than be lectured at prefer to ask questions.

  There are about two dozen, mostly in their twenties and thirties, the most interested and articulate a Glasgow boy with a deep scar on his left cheek, who did Talking Heads as an A-level set book last year and is counted one of their successes. He kicks off straight away with questions, which then come without any of the awkwardness or silences there were at Wandsworth. There’s a sophisticated Indian with a vaguely American accent, one older man who from his questions has had something to do with the film industry and a young man in a tracksuit with a lovely lit-up face who seems unable to stop smiling. There’s lots and lots of charm, which one detects as charm and so is wary of, being made to wonder what part charm has played in whatever crimes these men have committed; at the same time it’s hard not to be touched by this strong desire to please.

  The teachers, while gratified that their pupils are so responsive, are anxious that one doesn’t think them angels. The young man with the scar is there for armed robbery, the smiling boy has been convicted of a particularly nasty murder. (‘He was quite famous for a time,’ says one of the teachers.) Afterwards I regret not asking the men more questions myself, particularly about why they’re here, though aware that it’s not the form to do so (not the form to ask about form). The predominant feeling is one of waste, that these men have been locked up and nothing is being done with them. With resources stretched to breaking point, these classes are the next target in the event of further cuts. And this is the other impression one comes away with: the universal hatred and contempt for Michael Howard*– prisoners, warders, teachers, everybody one speaks to complaining how he has stripped away from the service all those amenities which alleviate the lives of everyone cooped up here, warders and prisoners alike. Indeed one get
s the feeling that the only thing that is holding the prison service together and making it for the moment work is this shared hatred for Michael Howard.

  Confused and depressed, I have my handprints checked to ensure I am the same person now as the one who came here two hours ago; then I drive in high winds across the chemical countryside and down the A1, managing a quick bath before I bike down to the Comedy, where I’m filling in for Maggie Smith, who has laryngitis.

  9 November. To New York, travelling economy on British Airways as I generally do, though always in the hope (seldom realised) that I might be recognised and upgraded. It isn’t that I can’t afford the club-class fare but £2,000 seems a lot of money to pay for something I dislike as much as I do flying, even though the alternative is seven hours of discomfort. There’s a Yorkshire dialect word that covers this feeling more succinctly than any phrase in standard English. When you can afford something but don’t like to see the money go in that particular way you say: ‘I can’t thoil to pay it.’ Which is exactly what I feel about club class. Most of my contemporaries seem to find organisations willing to pay their transatlantic fares for them, but I don’t do very well here either and when Random House brought out Writing Home in the US last year they claimed their budget didn’t run to flying me over for the occasion be it club class or economy.

  17 November, New York. I sit in Dean and Delucca on Prince Street, reading how the men in brown coats have finally come to Westminster Abbey and carted off the Stone of Scone. No one in Scotland seems in the least impressed with John Major’s imaginative gesture: they’ve got more sense, though with the relic up for grabs there was an undignified scramble between various venues wanting it for its commercial and tourist potential. In this sense it’s very much in the tradition of all the other Tory sell-offs.