Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  After supper we go down to look at the scene in the Mall, which is full of people not particularly silent, no mood at all, really, just walking up and down as if coming away from an event, though it’s also like a huge passeg-giata. People crowd to the walls and hedges, where there are flowers and little candlelit shrines; flowers fixed to trees, poems, painted messages; a Union Jack and teddy bears (which always bode ill). Many are Asian and the populousness of it, as well as the random milling about, make me think that this is perhaps what India is like.

  The evening is redeemed by an extraordinary sight. Despite the hundreds and hundreds of people trooping past, here, on the grass by the corner of Stable House Street, is a fox. It is just out of the light, slinking by with its head turned towards the parade of people passing, none of whom notice it. It’s quite small, as much fawn as red, and is, I imagine, a vixen. It lopes unhurriedly along the verge before diving under the hedge into St James’s Palace grounds. Besides us only one woman notices it, but that’s probably just as well: such is the hysteria and general silliness it might have been hailed as the reincarnation of Princess Diana, another beautiful vixen, with whom lots of parallels suggest themselves. We walk back through Green Park where, set back from the Victoria Memorial, is a bright little bivouac, which I take to be people pitching camp and staking a claim for the procession tomorrow. In fact it’s the HQ of British Telecom, half a dozen technicians squatting under their orange canopy, their interest focused on computer screens. It’s the kind of subject Eric Ravilious would have picked out, or Ardizzone in the Western Desert.

  Walk back through Shepherd Market, now smart and gentrified, cafés on pavements and all that. Except it hasn’t altogether changed, as in one corner there’s an open door, a lighted staircase and a notice: ‘New Tasty Babe Upstairs’.

  15 September, Yorkshire. Blackberrying up Black Bank, taking with me one of Miss Shepherd’s old walking sticks. Huge clusters of berries so that one can gather them almost by the handful. Never so utterly at peace as when picking blackberries or looking for mushrooms, the spread of Ingleborough and Pen-y-ghent still sunny while black clouds gather over Morecambe. A flock of sheep comes up the road and won’t pass me until I stand in the ditch. The pretty farm girl who is bringing up the rear seems almost as reluctant to pass as the sheep, just giving me a shy ‘Hello’ and running on. A mountain ash tree, weighed down with huge swags of crimson berries, catches the last of the sun. It’s like something by Samuel Palmer; paint it as bright and glowing as it is and it would seem like a vision.

  25 September. The Bradford Telegraph and Argus rings at about ten-thirty to say that Jonathan Silver has died. I last spoke to him in July, when he rang to say that I had been much in his mind since he was now wholly at the mercy of his doctors and so was feeling like George III. Some of their procedures (a baseball cap filled with ice worn for some hours to preserve his hair from radiotherapy) would not have been out of place in the eighteenth century. I am normally immune to enthusiasm and even recoil from it but Jonathan’s was irresistible, and I admired the fact that he had created at Salt’s Mill an arts centre, a bookshop, a restaurant and a gallery crammed with Hockneys, and that it wasn’t simply pious or well intentioned but worked well on every level, artistic and commercial.

  He was proud of the success of Salt’s Mill and delighted to show it off, even taking one round the premises of the various firms whose rents made the running of the gallery possible. A look of patient indulgence would come over the faces of these northern executives, knowing that he was obsessive and bearing it patiently, because, had he not been so, the Mill would never have taken off.

  In a way it’s fitting that the setting for all this should have been Saltaire, the inspiration of the Nonconformist nineteenth-century mill owner and philanthropist Sir Titus Salt. Voluble, pony-tailed, brimming with enthusiasm, Jonathan Silver was his worthy successor.

  26 September. Listen to a superb recording of Tristram Shandy read by John Moffatt, who manages to make sense in the reading of stuff that is almost incomprehensible on the page. John was once doing some Chekhov in Edinburgh and heard a lady coming away afterwards say: ‘There was a lot of laughter at the end of the first act, but I soon put a stop to that.’ He also played in Perth, where The Cherry Orchard was billed as The Cheery Orchard.

  30 September. Read The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel by Arnold Wesker, an account of his attempts to get his play Shylock produced and how it flopped on Broadway. Much of it I find sympathetic, though the only lesson I can draw from it is that playwright and director should never correspond. The text is full of letters from Wesker to Peter Hall, from John Dexter to Wesker and from Wesker to anyone who would listen. The last letter I wrote concerning a production of one of my plays was in 1977, when I tried, with the permission of the director, to change the performance of one of the actors in The Old Country. It didn’t work, as letters in my experience never do work; however larded with praise, they almost invariably cause offence. You can say what you think or not, but never write it down.

  6 October. Rowse dies, the obituary in the Independent by Jack Simmons much kinder than one might have expected. I only met him a few times, first in 1973 at All Souls, when he was so pleased with himself and so concerned to strike the ‘me me me’ note that he was untalkable to. When I used to see him as an undergraduate I was always struck by his massive forehead, a feature that doesn’t come out in photographs. Bruce McFarlane, while he made fun of him, says somewhere in his letters that there was another side to him, one of great kindness and consideration. There must have been more than met the later eye because as he got older he was a terrible bore, one reason he was passed over for honours for so long presumably being that the great and the good who decide such things had been given too many earfuls when dining at All Souls.

  He was a compulsive diarist, Bruce saying that when he was out walking Rowse often fell behind in order to write down one of his remarks. It’s said in the obituaries that Eliot liked his poems but this doesn’t accord with Charles Monteith’s story of coming into Eliot’s office at Faber’s one morning and finding him pacing the room, groaning. ‘More poems from Leslie Rowse. Oh God.’

  He came up to Oxford (as he never tired of telling you) as a scholarship boy from Cornwall, the son of working-class parents and with what was presumably a broad Cornish accent. What I’ve always wanted to know is when exactly his native tones gave way to the exaggerated Oxford accent he always affected. Was it a sudden change or did it happen gradually? It’s one of the many questions I should have asked McFarlane but never got round to.

  24 October. Headline in the Observer: ‘Boy, six, raped by girl of 14’. This is the main front-page headline and presumably what the Observer thinks is the most important item of news this weekend.

  7 November. Isaiah Berlin dies. I’ve never understood (as he claims he never understood) why he should have been held in such high intellectual esteem. His writing is windy and verbose and the only one of his books I’ve managed to get through is The Hedgehog and the Fox, read when I was twenty. He was the darling of the New York Review of Books, which in the eighties seemed to carry pieces about him in virtually every issue.

  I’m currently reading Errata, the intellectual autobiography of George Steiner. I wish it wasn’t quite so intellectual, as the purely autobiographical sections – e.g. his early days at the University of Chicago – are fascinating. Steiner, in contrast to Berlin, never fails to embroil you in his language, making the reader feel that his thoughts have been hewn from the living flesh, as Kafka and Wittgenstein felt they should be. But again in contrast to Berlin, Steiner has not had much luck in commending himself to the English, partly because he’s awkward and, I imagine, touchy; and as he himself admits, the breadth of his approach, and not being modest or self-conscious about his intellectual equipment, have provoked ‘distaste, professional suspicion and marginalisation’. Berlin and Steiner would make good protagonists in a play, the two Jews, both
supremely intellectual but one modest, self-deprecating and social, the other chippy, difficult and wholly unassimilable, so never given his due.

  Apropos Steiner, there was a time in the early seventies when some friends and their families, including Brian Wenham, Derrick Amoore and Francis Hope (all dead before their time), used to rent a villa on the Mediterranean every summer. One year they were most excited to learn that Steiner was due to rent the villa next door. All of them, particularly Francis, were mettlesome intellects and they looked forward to the advent of Steiner and some off-the-cuff seminars.

  Steiner duly arrived but turned out to be Steiner the hairdresser.

  9 November. Cool and showery but on the M40 going towards Oxford we drive out of the rain into a perfect autumn day, windy and cold with the sky swept clean of clouds. First to Easington, a remote church by a farmyard. I last came here twenty years ago, and since then the roof has been almost blown off and restored, but though there’s a new and brutal farm building within a few yards of the south wall it’s still a delightful place. Driving back over the hill to the road we see two huge birds with a wingspan of three or four feet, much larger than hawks and certainly not herons, which are clumsy fliers and trail their legs, whereas these bank and soar and circle and eventually make off across the fields. We turn into a field to have our sandwiches and there they are again, about a quarter of a mile away, swooping over a ploughed field and occasionally alighting, once coming close enough for us to see the white bars under their wings.

  Then on to Great Milton to see the Dormer tomb. The church is locked, and when we get the key from a nearby cottage the woman tells us that it’s because the helm and sword of Sir Michael Dormer, which have hung above his tomb for nearly four hundred years, were stolen two weeks ago. This makes me feel murderous, but it’s a superb tomb, a double-decker repositioned in the nineteenth century so that the feet of Sir Michael, Dorothea his lady and Ambrose his father are all turned firmly towards the altar. Wonderful though it is, it’s not quite in the same class as the Fettiplace tombs at Swinbrook, where the effigies are stacked one on top of the other as if in a sepulchral couchette.

  10 November. I tell my agent Rosalind Chatto about seeing the huge birds and ten minutes later her partner, Michael Linnit, rings to say that what we saw were red kites. He lives on top of the Chilterns and often sees them and has even had them on his lawn. A few years ago a pair migrated or were brought from Wales, their only surviving habitat, and flourished in their new surroundings to the extent that there are now five or six pairs. They take voles and pigeons even, and are fearless in the presence of humans, their only enemy nowadays egg collectors.

  16 November, Yorkshire. I watch two unlisted and unadvertised programmes on BBC2 in which Isaiah Berlin is interviewed by Michael Ignatieff. Never having seen Berlin or heard him (except in frequent imitation), I fall straight away for his charm and see how one would want to think that here was a good man living the true life of the mind.

  It had occurred to me that Berlin was the antithesis of Wittgenstein and that Berlin in spate, as it were, would have been intolerable to a philosopher who was, to say the least, somewhat more terse. It transpires that they did once meet and that even Wittgenstein succumbed to the spell, not much caring for what Berlin said, but welcoming the honesty with which he said it. Though his writing is often inflated his mode of utterance is endlessly fascinating. Down the road from here is a spring called the Ebbing and Flowing Well, which bubbles up and falls back much as Berlin does, words overflowing from his mouth rather like a baby bringing back its food. He would have been almost impossible to dislike and I find myself greatly cheered.

  4 December. To the funeral at St Dunstan’s, Canterbury, of John Williams, whom I have known since we were at Oxford and whose character is summed up in an incident during his National Service. Entered for officer selection, he found himself pitted against another candidate on an obstacle course. Arriving at a hanging rope at the same time as the other man, John stood back politely and said: ‘After you.’ Which would have been all right except that a major general who was observing the proceedings went purple in the face and immediately put an end to John’s prospects.

  I am early for the service and wander round the church, ancient-looking on the outside but heavily Victorianised within and seemingly without much of interest. However, in the south aisle are a couple of sixteenth-century tombs, beneath which is the vault of the Roper family. William Roper was the son-in-law of Sir Thomas More, and after More’s execution in 1535, his daughter Margaret, who was married to William, bribed someone to remove the parboiled head from London Bridge and kept it in spices for the rest of her life. Investigations in the nineteenth century revealed a grille in the Roper vault behind which was a skull, thought to be that of Sir Thomas, St Thomas as he now is, so the chapel in this undistinguished-seeming church is a place of Catholic pilgrimage. None of which has much to do with John Williams, whose coffin now waits in the porch. The church is full of his friends, few of whom know each other. Were he here (which he is and he isn’t) he would have been going round the pews apologising to the congregation that they had had to go to the trouble of attending his funeral.

  ‘We’ve got a stone hot-water bottle,’ John wrote to me in 1959. ‘Mother uses it for airing the beds. I have filled it with flowers – it makes a good vase – at least, quite a good one and anyway it’s nice to think that the hot-water bottle is being admired for what it is rather than for what it does. I really think it is grateful, though this must sound very silly in a letter.’ This catches some of the qualities that were peculiar to him: his odd angle on the world and sympathy for both people and things that were unregarded in it; his ability to see form and beauty in the most mundane objects and which one saw again and again in his house, in the furniture he restored and the tools which he almost obsessively collected. It catches, too, a divine silliness about him which struck me forcibly when he was a young man at Oxford, though it was a quality he happily retained all his life.

  He was a craftsman of a kind that has nowadays disappeared. Largely self-taught, he knew the nature of the materials with which he worked and lavished care and affection on them. He haunted car-boot sales and couldn’t resist rescuing old tools, of which he eventually had a vast collection and which now happily is to go to the National Trust. The V&A has some of his leather work as do a dozen great houses – and once he made a guitar sling for Paul McCartney.

  Coming away from the gathering afterwards, I find that just as there isn’t an object in his house I wouldn’t want, so there isn’t a person I’ve talked to whom I haven’t liked. Trying to extract some sort of message from his life, I think it’s something to do with privacy and diversity and the persistence in an increasingly homogeneous world of rarity, individuality and character. John was like someone out of the nineteenth century, out of Dickens in particular, so much was he his own man.*

  1998

  10 January. Listen to a tape Ariel Crittall has made about her life at the request of the Imperial War Museum. She remembers meeting Unity and Diana Mitford off the train in Munich on the morning of the Night of the Long Knives and Diana saying: ‘What bliss. The first time I’ve been on a train without a nanny or a husband!’

  Ariel’s language is a joy. About meeting Hitler she remarks: ‘I was pregnant at the time so I wasn’t feeling very … brisk. Hitler said, “I only have four words in a foreign language, the four words being: Vous êtes mon prisonnier.”’

  24 January. Note the hairstyle of two of the Catholic boys carrying the coffin of their father or their brother, murdered by the UVF in an effort to disrupt the talks. The hair is cut short at the front but selected locks are left a little longer to dangle over the forehead in an attenuated fringe. Somehow to see them both with these carefully considered haircuts makes the scene even more touching.

  6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English
Heritage. During the enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1890 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America: Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so on. Today the farm, with its echoes of the pampas, has been swallowed up by the Ministry of Defence’s Training Area and so is now the playground of those upright and blameless young men recently corrupted by the shameless women of Catterick.

  15 February. The train from Leeds comes to a halt somewhere outside Wakefield, where it waits for ten minutes. Then, when we have got going again, there is a crash from the front of the train as if something colossal has fallen over. At Doncaster it is announced that the first delay was on account of a family sitting on the line trying to commit suicide, and then, in an unrelated incident, some youths had hurled a brick through one of the windows. The window is replaced and so is the driver, who is presumably shocked (or ‘in shock’ as we are supposed to say).

  On the train is a judge whom I know slightly from fifty years ago when we both used to do our homework in the City Reference Library. When the announcement is made about the attempted family suicide and the hooliganism that follows I notice that he does not even raise his eyes from his papers, behaviour of this nature being presumably what his job has led him to expect.

  15 March, Yorkshire. Having seen there was a Bronze Age stone circle (more accurately the remains of a barrow) at Yockenthwaite I look at the map and see what I take to be a narrow and presumably little-used road over from Hawes. It’s a spectacular day with deep snowdrifts still on the tops where we stop to look at the Roman road snaking over Cam Fell and down to Bainbridge. Then through Oughtershaw and along Langstrothdale by what is called Oughtershaw Beck but is in fact the Wharfe, both the Wharfe and the Ribble rising in these hills, one flowing south, the other west. The stone circle is small and hard to find and the search is made harder because all down the beck cars are parked on the verge and the supposedly unfrequented road up the valley very busy. I had forgotten, but it’s always been like this in the Wharfe Valley from Otley and Ilkley northward, no stretch of it remote or unvisited – Bolton Abbey, Burnsall, Kettlewell, Buckden, nowhere now too desolate or far-flung.