Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  24 December. I watch the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s with the familiar words, as particularly with carols, coming unbidden and with them the same odd associations. ‘Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing’, for instance, has always seemed to me like theatrical billing – and without thinking I’ve taken it as meaning that, until this afternoon the daftness of it comes home.

  27 December, Yorkshire. A wet dark day as it has been all through Christmas. Train late into Leeds, where we pick up a car and drive out through Garforth and Castleford to Methley. The church (noted from Pevsner) is locked and when we go to the vicarage for the key the vicar, a woman, asks me for some identification. When I show her my railcard she glances at it briefly and says, ‘Yes, I thought it was you’ (which isn’t quite what identification means).

  The church is well worth the detour, though, crammed with monuments, many of them in the Waterton chantry, which has a painted, coffered ceiling and two superb fifteenth-century alabaster tombs with that of Lord Welles (killed at Towton in 1461) particularly fine – the features (broken nose, big chin, pudding-basin haircut) make it seem a definite portrait, though the church leaflet says not. Waterton’s own tomb is even bolder and more individual but the most striking monument is to a seventeenth-century Savile and his son and daughter-in-law, done by Maximilian Colt, who sculpted Elizabeth I’s monument in Westminster Abbey.

  Elsewhere in the church are two faceless reclining figures and, acting as corbels, some huge grotesque stone heads. I don’t take much notice of these but it turns out that these carvings are why the church is famous as they are among the earliest subjects of Henry Moore who, visiting his aunt at Methley as a boy of nine, used to come to the church and draw. Which is a link with Blake, whose first experience as an artist was also drawing tombs, in his case in Westminster Abbey when he was apprenticed to an engraver.

  The church as a whole is fascinating (though rather snubbingly dismissed in Pevsner as ‘over-restored’) and full of curiosities, with oddest of all in the vestry a rather watery crucifixion done by Robert Medley, the schoolboy friend of Auden who first turned him on to poetry. I mean to ask the vicar how it got here but when we return the key she is so keen to tell us how, apropos Henry Moore, the church has its own website that I forget.

  It’s dark when we get to the village, where the beck is high, the moon almost full and snow on the tops. We fetch in some logs, light the fire and have cheese on toast.

  1999

  12 January. A New York producer sends me Waiting in the Wings, Noël Coward’s play about a theatrical retirement home – Denville Hall, I suppose it is. He wants me to update it, though lest I should think this kind of thing beneath me what he says he wants is ‘a new perspective on the play’.

  The perspective will have to be a pretty distant one as it now seems a creaking piece all round, the only character not requiring updating (or a new perspective) is an old actress, Sarita Myrtle, who’s gone completely doolally, and so still seems contemporary. The most startling revelation is that it includes a character called Alan Bennet (sic) who is described as ‘in his late forties. He is neatly dressed but there is an indefinable quality of failure about him.’

  Coward’s play was staged in September 1960, a month after Beyond the Fringe, and a year after I had appeared on stage for the first time with the Oxford Theatre Group. (I am just thinking how the name might have lodged in Coward’s mind.) Nobody has ever noticed it before – not even Nora Nicholson, who played Sarita Myrtle and was with me in Forty Years On.

  13 January. Humphrey Carpenter comes round to do some fact-checking for his forthcoming book on satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of the house.

  27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d written about him, she has tried to read Kafka but without success. For the same reason she asked at the library for something on Larkin but seeing his photograph gave the book straight back: ‘He looked too much like Sergeant Bilko.’

  28 January. I switch on the Antiques Roadshow where someone is showing an expert a drawing by E. H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh. It’s a cartoon or an illustration dated 1942, entitled ‘Gobbling Market’ and meant as a satire on black marketeers. It was for Punch but it could just as easily have been for Der Stürmer, as all the black marketeers are strongly Semitic in features, some as demonic as the worst Nazi propaganda. The expert makes no reference to this, except to say: ‘It’s very strong.’ When the owner bought the drawing he’d had the chance of getting a Winnie the Pooh cartoon instead: that would have appreciated in value a good deal but ‘Gobbling Market’ not at all, which is encouraging.

  9 February. Yesterday evening to the National Gallery’s Ingres exhibition. Some glowing early portraits … the earliest like Fabre or Géricault and the best an extraordinary painting of his friend J. B. Desdéban. Red-haired, orange-jacketed and against a russet background, he’s not unlike the Chicago Degas of the woman having her hair brushed, which is another exercise in red. Ingres is supposed to have said it was the best thing he ever did and it could be taken for an early Picasso. Lynn points out how bony and articulated the hands are in the drawings whereas in the paintings the hands become fat, boneless and almost claw-like.

  Dame Iris Murdoch dies and gets excellent reviews, all saying how (morally) good she was, though hers was not goodness that seemed to require much effort, just a grace she had been given: so she was plump and she was also good, both attributes she had been born with and didn’t trouble herself over. I wonder if it’s easier to be good if you don’t care whether you’re wearing knickers or mind, as Wittgenstein didn’t, living on porridge; goodness more accessible if you’re what my mother used to call ‘a sluppers’.

  Nobody explains (or seems to think an explanation required) how this unworldly woman managed to be made a dame by Mrs Thatcher and was laden with honorary degrees; sheer inadvertence perhaps.

  In a later obituary it’s said that she approved of the Falklands War and one begins to see that for all her goodness and mild appeal she may have trod the same path as her contemporaries Amis and Larkin. Masked though she was in kindliness and general benevolence, she may have ended up as far from her radical beginnings as they did, Dame Iris’s spiritual journey not all that different from Paul Johnson’s.

  10 February. At Christmas G. and R. gave me a subscription to This England (‘Britain’s Loveliest Magazine’), which at first seemed a conventional magazine of the countryside with thatched cottages, country houses and even Patience Strong. Closer examination shows it to be more sinister: it is seemingly the house magazine of the Society of Saint George and dedicated to the preservation of the English identity. A second number comes today, more virulent than the last with columns of correspondence all fervently opposed to the European connection, denouncing Labour (and half the Conservatives) as traitors. It’s the usual stuff, except to find a magazine ostensibly devoted to singing the praises of the countryside but peddling such rot is quite disturbing. And of course not a black face to be seen. It’s the kind of publication one laughs about, but go a thousand miles across Europe and sentiments no more rancid and parochial are inspiring neighbours to slit each other’s throats.

  12 March. Reading P. Ackroyd’s Thomas More, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of Utopia and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not short of hypocrisy. It’s hard not to feel there is something specifically English about this two-mindedness (More’s, not mine). Ackroyd writes how during his time in prison M
ore was tormented by fears of torture and the barbarities of his possible punishment, without it seeming to occur to him (or Ackroyd) that the torments he had himself visited on heretics were just as terrible. Nor did these have a dogmatic justification as intended to save the victims from the pains of hell; More rejoiced in the cruelties since they gave the poor souls a foretaste of eternal fire. However noble his conduct in the face of death it’s difficult to feel much sympathy with him. Henry VIII is a devil but that doesn’t make More a saint.

  In the afternoon to Kendal and the Abbot Hall Gallery, notable for its collection of Romneys (Romney died in Kendal). Less taken by the finished portraits, which are staid and wooden, than by his preliminary sketches, some of them so rough and full of energy they’re reminiscent of Frank Auerbach, though none of this dash survives into the finished portraits. Occasionally funny, too, particularly a sketch of Two Lovers Startled by a Young Person, a child gazing at a snogging couple.

  22 March. Good example of journalistic spite last week when I was rung by the Independent (journalist’s name forgotten) wanting my comments on a movement for Yorkshire independence. I say I have none. ‘What, none at all?’ ‘No,’ and I put the phone down. In the item the next day it is recorded that I have no comment despite having written such ‘treacly’ plays about the region. An untreacly (and incorrect) joke about Yorkshire via George Melly:

  A driver lost near Leeds stops to ask a local the way.

  ‘Excuse me. Do you know the Bradford turn-off?’

  ‘I should do. I married her.’

  7 April. I call at the Regent Bookshop in Parkway to find Peter the proprietor’s mother there with a bundle of papers she’s brought in for him to photocopy. She is from Vienna, which she left in 1938 at the age of twenty, her parents having managed to find someone in England who would employ her and her two sisters as domestics and so procure them visas.

  Here is her passport stamped with a large red J and the letters she wrote after the war trying to find out what happened to her parents, both dead in a camp. I come away thinking about the supposed shame stamped on the passport and the grudging visa that had saved her life. The issues then all seem so clear and much more shocking than what now happens every day on the borders of Yugoslavia. Easier to be indignant about, too, with, sixty years ago, the rights and wrongs so unquestionable. Whereas nowadays one says: ‘Well, they’ve always been at each other’s throats,’ and ‘If the Serbs weren’t doing it to them they would be doing it to the Serbs.’ And so I often don’t read any of the five or six pages the papers devote every morning to Kosovo, as maybe I wouldn’t have read about the Jews clamouring to get out of Germany and Austria in 1938.

  13 April. Watching Great Expectations on TV, I found it lacked (and rather prided itself on lacking) the element of the grotesque that Dickens needs, one reason being the costume design. Most costume dramas, whether on stage or film, tend to assume that fashions came and went in the past much as they do today. But it’s only in the last fifty or sixty years that there’ve been large retail outlets like Burton’s or M&S which have homogenised fashion. Before that, the latest thing must have impinged on ordinary lives much less, so that there would be characters in 1830 still going around in the fashions of 1800, say. My grandmother in 1949 was still wearing the long duster coats she had worn in 1920 and Queen Mary looked like an Edwardian lady all her life: dying in the fifties, she still dressed as she had in 1910. Look at Ford Madox Brown’s Work: only the middle and upper classes are dressed in a contemporary way; the workmen, the flower seller and the poorer characters are dressed in what comes to hand – fashion doesn’t enter into it. Portraits, too, are deceptive as the sitters generally choose to be in their Sunday best.

  Apropos of which, one of the many pleasures of Judy Egerton’s National Gallery catalogue of The British School is her dissection of the hunting gear worn by Lord Ribblesdale in Sargent’s famous portrait. Though he seems the epitome of high fashion, in this as in much else he isn’t typical and certainly isn’t wearing what the well-dressed Master of Foxhounds might have chosen but an assemblage of favourite garments that are no less striking for being utterly individual.

  16 April. Foul young businessman on the train making arrangements for the evening with a girlfriend via his mobile phone. ‘Save some for me,’ he says, and as he signs off: ‘Be kissed.’

  1 May, Oxford. Outside the Museum of Natural History in Parks Road is a large stone disc curved, faceted and looking like a giant turtle shell. The label says it’s a ‘septarian concretion’, consisting of limestone formed 165 million years ago and found in the Bicester clay in 1984. Similar limestone concretions, though more the size of tortoise shells, are in various gardens and borders in our village in Yorkshire, having been found in the bed of the village beck, where they’re unsurprisingly not called ‘septarian concretions’ but ‘pudding stones’.

  We look round the Museum, much more spick and span than it was when I was last here as an undergraduate, when the cast-iron roof and elaborate arcading were less well thought of and more of a piece with the dusty dinosaur skeletons down below. Wanting to ask about porphyry, I spot a middle-aged man rearranging one of the showcases and ask him if he knows anything about stones. ‘I should do,’ he says. ‘I’m one of the curators.’ I tell him about visiting Chastleton, the seventeenth-century house near Chipping Norton newly restored by the National Trust, and it turns out he was the expert called in to advise on the conservation of the stonework. The Trust was anxious to know where the stone had originally been quarried. He told them to walk across the field opposite the house and when they came to a dip in the ground and the house disappeared from view that would be where the stone came from. And so it was.

  12 May. I go to the post office for my bus pass. The woman behind the counter leans over and says confidentially: ‘Is it your first time?’ It’s as if I’m going to a brothel. Except that in a brothel they don’t require proof of residence or identity and I’m sent home to get them.

  14 May. A piece in the Independent about David Blunkett tackling failing standards in education. I am pictured, though whether as evidence of decline or hope for the future I can’t make out. Either would please me.

  Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted Hughes’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey was an odd mixture, with a surprising number of old aristocratic biddies (the oldest being the Queen Mother), and society (the dead poets society, I suppose) well represented. It’s no secret that the Laureate had put it about a bit, which, of course, isn’t mentioned in the tributes, though there is some comment afterwards that the service had more of Hughes than it did of God and that it was altogether too free-form. I rather wish it had been more so, and done on the lines of Graham Norton’s current TV show, so that the priest in charge could have said: ‘All sit … but remain standing those who had any sort of fling with the deceased.’

  15 May. Finish reading A Pacifist’s War by Frances Partridge and start reading Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, both books covering the same period though from different angles, foxholes at Ham Spray and foxholes at Stalingrad hardly the same. Stalingrad is unsurprisingly a bestseller, the course of the conflict making it compulsive reading and almost Homeric, the two vain and wilful leaders like the gods meddling with and frustrating the best efforts of their generals, and the troops on both sides suffering unimaginable hardships. So, though I’m feeling quite low this morning, I look round my cosy book-lined room and think: ‘Well, at least it’s not Stalingrad: it’s warm and I don’t have lice.’

  The struggle in the ruins of Stalingrad I think I knew about as a boy from a series in Hotspur or Wizard; there was certainly a storyline set in the tunnels under Odessa and I think Stalingrad, too. This can’t have been much later than 1943, the war I suppose a godsend to comics whose writers kept up with its progress. The setting of ruined cities, though, may have eventually got monotonous or confusing; I’m not sure now, for instance, that I’m not mixing up Stalingrad with a sli
ghtly later series of stories set in the ruins of Monte Cassino.

  11 June. Watching them Beating the Retreat on TV last night, I remember how, when I was doing basic training at the start of National Service, against all my inclinations and instincts I came to enjoy drill and how (had I played the trumpet) I might have been quite happy as a military bandsman.

  8 July. It seemed unlikely that Classic FM could get worse but it has. I switched on briefly yesterday to hear an announcer (all of whom feel it necessary to have a smile in their voices) saying: ‘That was the very catchy third movement of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto.’ Still, one should no doubt be grateful their pronunciation has improved. I was startled in its earlier days to hear a presenter announce the ballet music from ‘The Female Guardee’. This turned out to be La Fille mal gardée.

  Actually a ballet called ‘The Female Guardee’ might be quite interesting. Better than Giselle anyway.

  24 July. Wake this Sunday morning with what seemed in my dream a superb title for a play: ‘The Fun to be Had with Models of Dubious Sensibility’.

  30 July. Jessye Norman has been appearing at the Barbican. She is touchy about her size and, having difficulty getting into a small aeroplane, is supposed to have been told by the air hostess to try getting in sideways. ‘Lady,’ she is said to have remarked, ‘I ain’t got no sideways.’