Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  The return of the largely unwanted Stone was intended to buoy up the hapless Mr Forsyth, though any favour the government might have hoped to curry north of the border has since been wiped out by the aftermath of Dunblane. Sometimes feeling I am the last person in the country to believe in the monarchy, I am surprised the Queen didn’t make more fuss. The Stone, if only by association, must be considered a part of the royal regalia over which the government, constitutionally, has no say at all. J. Major obviously didn’t think of it as of much consequence, as the original decision was conveyed to the Dean of Westminster by some lowly official with a chitty. Whatever one expects from this government it’s not a sense of history, and with a Japanese hotel opposite the Houses of Parliament and a Ferris wheel dwarfing Big Ben, who cares that the shrine of Edward the Confessor has been robbed of its most ancient relic? As it is, the Coronation Chair is left looking like an empty commode. In view of the current state of the monarchy this may seem appropriate and please a lot of people, but not me.

  1 December, New York. To the Brooklyn Museum to see In the Light of Italy, plein-air paintings by Thomas Jones, Valenciennes and the predecessors of Corot. It’s a vast building with wide corridors and huge airy galleries, though without much atmosphere and no sense that the building itself might be of interest; the museum just a series of plain rooms within its shell. Take my canvas stool, which is a great talking point with other gallery-goers, mostly elderly and female and wanting the same.

  On the way home we stop for some tea at Barnes and Noble on Union Square. All the Barnes and Noble bookshops have lately been transformed, turned into what are virtually free libraries. There are easy chairs in which people are encouraged to read the books on display; tables at which students are sitting, making notes from the books and, upstairs in the café, a huge rack of every conceivable magazine and newspaper which you are encouraged to take to your table to read with your tea, reading all that is required. Nor is it simply patronised by what one might think of as the reading public. A workman in overalls is sitting looking at a book on Chardin, the little black boy in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus who came into the library to look at a book on Gauguin now grown up. But it doesn’t have to be as worthy as that: the boy at the next table is leafing through a muscle mag. The feeling is overwhelmingly democratic and lifts the spirits. It’s said that the experiment has improved business. I hope so, as it’s inspiring to see and, as so often in America, one is shamed by a civic sense which, if we ever had it in England, we don’t have now. Dutifully readers clear their tables, put the trash in the bin and the magazines back on the racks and behave in a way that is both more civilised and considerate and (this is where we would really fall down) unselfconscious than we could ever manage. God bless America.

  1997

  2 January. I’m sent a complimentary (sic) copy of Waterstone’s Literary Diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary figures from the world of letters. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’

  4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since become so common that Christie’s has now suspended credit card payments altogether.

  6 January, Yorkshire. Ring Mr Redhead, the coal-merchant in Ingleton.

  ‘Hello, Mr Redhead, this is Alan Bennett. I’m wanting some coal.’

  ‘Goodness me! I am consorting with higher beings!’

  Last time I rang Mr Redhead he said, ‘Well, I don’t care how celebrated you are, you’ll never be a patch on your dad.’ I remind him of this.

  ‘That’s correct and I reiterate it.’

  13 January. Liam Gallagher, the younger of the Oasis brothers, has the kind of eyes in which the pupils are half-hidden under the eyelids; as if the eyes had stopped between floors. Spike Lee has similar eyes, which I find attractive, maybe because they give a sense of inhabiting worlds other than this; they are, of course, irritating for exactly the same reason.

  A call from Barry Cryer, who claims to have heard a woman outside Liberty’s saying to her husband: ‘Remind me to tell Austin that there is no main verb in that sentence.’

  15 January, Yorkshire. Trying to put my forty-year-old letters in order, I come across a diary for 1956–9. It’s depressing to read as very little of it is factual and most of it to do with my slightly sickening obsession with, coupled with a lack of insight into, my own character. It’s full of embarrassing resolutions about future conduct and exhortations to myself to do better. Love is treated very obliquely, passing fancies thought of as echoes of some Grand Passion.

  My first inclination is to put it in the bin, though I probably won’t. I can see why writers do, though, fearful that these commonplace beginnings might infect what comes after with their banality. In this sense Orton (and to some extent Larkin) are exceptional, Orton’s early diaries written with the same peculiar slant on the world as his mature writing.

  1957 was the year I should have come down from Oxford but didn’t and one thing I think reading this tosh is that if I hadn’t got a First (the circumstances undescribed in the diary) I would never have picked myself up to do much except possibly teach badly. It was the fairly spurious self-confidence I got from this fluke result, plus the breathing space it gave, that enabled me to go on doing silly turns, being funny and thus eventually to write.

  20 January. Sheila J. up the road says that in last week’s fog she came upon two Brent geese grounded outside No. 60. She rang the RSPCA, who said that since they were on the road they were the responsibility of the highways authority. Camden being Camden the highways department was unreachable and probably had better things to do anyway. So, remembering that in fairy stories goose-girls always carried a stick, Sheila got one from a garden; at which point Juliet C. emerged and the two of them herded the geese up the Crescent, eventually penning them in the garden of No. 70. One settled happily in the ornamental pond there, but the other, taking advantage of the not very long lawn, took off for home, presumably Regent’s Park. In the morning its companion did the same.

  26 January. Come back on an early train from Yorkshire to catch the last day of the National Art Collections Fund exhibition at Christie’s. Expecting St James’s to be empty, I find every street crammed with cars. Christie’s, too, is crowded, full of art-lovers more specially earnest than the general run so that something about the show repels – the homogeneity of the art-lovers, perhaps, or their wholehearted worthiness and consistent middle-agedness. When I leave, the streets are full of disconsolate Roundheads and jubilant Cavaliers, the explanation for all the cars some mock battle in Green Park. Note how one passes these far from sheepish figures without a second glance; the kind of extraordinary feature of ordinary life that never gets into a film except as part of the plot.

  In the evening read at St Mark’s, Primrose Hill, in aid of the appeal against the demolition of the chapel of the old Boys’ Home in Regent’s Park Road and the construction of some frightful block of flats. Church packed, people standing at the back, and though the audience is a bit sticky to start with (heard it all before, I suspect), there is a good response at the end. I’d said no to an Evening Standard reporter who wanted to interview me and get a photograph. He’d been quite nice about it and gone away, but when I come out the photographer is still hanging about and asks me to pose with my bike. I say no, whereupon he starts snapping regardless. Even as I cycle off down Regent’s Park Road he runs after me snapping away. Why? On spec, I suppose, but the real reason he wants a photograph is that he knows I don’t. Whatever pictures he took would have me looking like a flustered turkey and presumably quite
silly, so whether this is preferable to the Me and My Bike shot he wanted in the first place is debatable.

  30 January. Meats is a form I don’t care for, the proper plural of meat being meat. Perhaps meats (on a van: ‘British Premium Meats’) means cooked meats, though meat would still be acceptable there, too. Meats suggests to me something not only cooked but sliced, and already beginning to curl at the edges. Odd that one should have any feelings, let alone care, about such usages.

  31 January. The limpid theme which introduces the Agnus Dei in Fauré’s Requiem currently introduces the product in the Lurpak butter commercial.

  Walk behind a tramp wearing no socks. Heels like turnips.

  6 February. Alec G. asks for help with finding questions for a charity literary quiz. Suggest:

  Q. Who thought the Venerable Bede was a woman?

  A. Field Marshal Haig, who said so after musing for some time beside the Venerable Bede’s tomb at Durham, presumably mixing up George Eliot and Adam Bede.

  Q. Where in Oxford would you find a crucifix that had been gazed on by Pascal?

  A. Campion Hall. (It is a Jansenist crucifix which comes from Port Royal.)

  Q. What had A. E. Housman in common with the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?

  A. A nickname: Mouse.

  Tell the Bede story to Maggie Smith, who recalls some lines she had to sing in revue:

  Oh, I am the Venerable Bede

  I can scarcely write and just about read.

  18 February. Listening to the last movement of Elgar’s First Symphony I’m put in mind of some huge submerged mass coming to the surface. What is this great sunken thing that now heaves itself into view, the water sluicing off it? England, is it? Destiny? A sense of purpose? This is how I used to think when I was seventeen: that music showed you how to live your life.

  As a boy, I was resigned though never reconciled to what I thought of as the back of beyondness, where I lived. Life in Leeds was desperately provincial and unexciting, so concerts in the Town Hall had another function in that they would sometimes bring to the city fabled creatures from the world of the wireless: Sargent, Barbirolli and even Beecham.

  Still, so famished was I for fame I must be one of the few boys who could have seen Sir Adrian Boult as in any sense an exotic and even a glamorous figure. Not quite an Edwardian, which he certainly looked, Boult seemed of another age entirely, a contemporary (though he wasn’t) of Elgar, whom with his walrus moustache he also resembled. Though what he also looked like was one of those inflexible generals (Sir Hubert Gough comes to mind) who had conducted the First War.

  Boult eschewed any emotion on the podium, his impassive beat varied only by the occasional clenched fist. He was thus an early entrant into my (slightly priggish) pantheon of non-histrionics which included, in poetry A. E. Housman, in literature E. M. Forster, in philosophy J. L. Austin and in the matter of crossing deserts Wilfred Thesiger. I knew I could never live up to any of them: I talked too much.

  20–21 February. Two days filming my TV parables programme Heavenly Stories at Dulwich College, the setting the Masters’ Library, a galleried, High Victorian room adjoining the school hall, presumably where the masters foregather before assembly. Over the chimneypiece are two crude allegorical panels of Piety and Liberality, the ideals of Alleyn’s foundation. There are plenty of nice books, many with a forties-ish feel, like Enthusiasm by Ronald Knox, one of the ‘wider reading’ books I swotted up for my scholarship.

  Remembering Bruce McFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammer-beam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of any other universities or places of higher education. And here is Bruce’s open scholarship to Exeter in 1922, his first-class degree three years later; his Senior Demyship at Magdalen in 1925 and the Bryce Studentship; then, in 1926, a fellowship at Magdalen. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t figure in any of the team photographs that line the corridors.

  A woman is restoring some of the lettering on the honours board and she tells me that until a few years ago they were covered in varnish and thick wallpaper, the work of an aesthetically minded headmaster’s wife. Now they are being restored and, as inaccuracies are uncovered (ex-pupils assigned to the wrong colleges), she is at work on corrections. She seems vaguely familiar and I start telling her about a woman I’d talked to a year or so ago, having gone into a church at Inglesham near Lechlade and found her restoring the wall-paintings there.

  ‘Yes,’ she says happily, ‘it was me.’ It seems an extraordinary coincidence. She tells me that the two paintings over the fireplace are far from being the daubs I thought they were but reputedly come from Queen Elizabeth I’s state barge and may even have accompanied Drake round the world on the Golden Hind.

  22 February. Jocelyn Herbert’s eightieth birthday party at the Royal College of Art, the Senior Common Room packed with everyone Jocelyn has known or worked with. There is music that has been specially composed, and a poem by Tony Harrison, the theme of which is all the toasts he and Jocelyn have drunk together in all the various places where they have worked around the world. They’re due to set off on Monday on another epic journey, the script, based on the Prometheus legend, about a gold statue transported from South Yorkshire (film of the demolition of some cooling towers near Barnsley) through Eastern Europe to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.

  I sit on a sofa with Alan Bates and Maggie Smith, thinking that no one would ever arrange such a do for me or get so many people to come. I turn to Maggie and she says: ‘Don’t say it. I know. I don’t think I could even fill the kitchen.’

  26 February. It’s thought that most of the frocks that Princess Diana is selling off will end up in the wardrobes of transvestites. Were someone set to write a script which would persistently humiliate the Royal Family they could scarcely do better (or worse) than the one which circumstances have devised.

  6 March. The eighty-five-year-old Sir Denis Mahon has been paying frequent visits to Discovering the Italian Baroque, the exhibition of his collection at the National Gallery, to which he has bequeathed many of the pictures that are on show. The other day a warder watched him for some time, then came up behind him and said: ‘I’ve had my eye on you. You get too close to the pictures.’ Sir Denis went to the Director and complimented him on the vigilance of his staff.

  25 March, Yorkshire. Everybody else seems to have seen the comet, but though I’ve been up on the roof several times searching the northern sky like Herod, I have seen nothing. We’re driving up from Leeds about eleven tonight when, without looking for it, I suddenly see it from the Addingham bypass, hovering, as it were, above Bolton Abbey. It dodges from side to side of the road all the way over into Airedale, then up to Settle and home. I can’t get over the spread of its tail, a great shower of light flying behind it, and also that the thing itself doesn’t look like a star but seems circular. In fact what is surprising is that a comet should look like the illustrations of comets. It’s so bright it’s as if there is a hole in the surface of the sky, a porthole through which the light is streaming from the shining world beyond. I look out again just before I go to bed and it’s still tearing through the clear sky with its 60-million-mile train.

  Maundy Thursday, Yorkshire. See on billboards in Leeds that HMQ has been in Bradford washing the feet of selected pensioners from the Bradford diocese, or rather paying in order not to. Interviewed, all the pensioners say they are overwhelmed at the honour done to the region; one says she knew the invitation was something out of the ordinary as the envelope wouldn’t go through her letter box. When I get to the village I find that one of these pensioners was our ex-pos
tman Maurice Brown. I ask him whether the Queen spoke to him. ‘No. She only stopped at people who had something wrong with them. I haven’t, so she just gave me the money.’

  29 March, Yorkshire. Easter Saturday and an appropriately monastic day out, going first via traffic-choked Northallerton to Mount Grace, which I had thought a remote spot but which is within sight and sound of the busy A19 to Teesside. Envy the nice life a Carthusian monk must have had in the early fifteenth century: meals brought to the door, sitting room, study and bedroom looking out on a little garden with, at the end of the colonnade, the loo.

  Then some delicious sandwiches (cold pheasant and stuffing) on the edge of a ploughed field near Masham, sun warm and the hawthorn just coming into leaf. We go down the hill to Well to look at the towering pinnacle of fretted wood over the font, 1352 and the second oldest in England. Then on to Jervaulx, one of the few monastic ruins not run by English Heritage or the National Trust but by its country-house owners, for whom it must once have been like an elaborate folly. The ruins are thatched with vegetation and herbaceous plants, and piled up round the grassy banks are great heaps of unlocated masonry. The plan of the abbey is quite clear, though, and I realise that any Cistercian monk could move from one abbey to another and not find himself puzzled as to his whereabouts. The component parts – cloisters, library, dormitory – might differ in scale, but the relationship between them would be much the same from one abbey to the next.

  2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan: ‘A.L. Raus’.

  14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom is talking about ‘the rodeo position’.