Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  The architect of this wonderful house is Lorimer, who designed many houses in Scotland, chiefly for the newly rich magnates of Glasgow and Dundee, but south of the border seems largely to have confined himself to war memorials.

  10 April. Going through the Public School Hymn Book today looking for a title for my memorial service short story, I read through ‘Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken’ (No. 385) and come to the line ‘Fading is the worldling’s pleasure’. I must have sung this line thousands of times and have always unthinkingly taken this to be a disparagement of the worldling’s languid approach to things, so that even when it came to pleasure the worldling couldn’t go at it wholeheartedly but gave it up halfway through. It’s only now, aged sixty-six, that I see that it’s the pleasure that’s meant to be fading and which doesn’t last. This isn’t half as subtle as my mistaken version and also tells you less about the aristocracy, which is what I’ve always taken these worldlings to be.

  11 April. Foot and mouth. One of the drunks down the market pauses before he puts his can to his lips. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘there’s no outbreak in South Tyrone,’ as if this were a good reason for drinking Strongbow at eight-thirty in the morning in Inverness Street market.

  A gay driving instructor who rather than tapping the windscreen with his clipboard finds he gets better emergency stops by putting his hand on his pupil’s knee.

  12 May. Watching five minutes at the conclusion of the Cup Final (to the outcome of which I am utterly indifferent), I wonder whether the girlfriend of Michael Owen, who scores the winning goal, will be thinking that any love they might make later on this evening will stand no comparison with the ecstasy induced by the goal, and what she feels about this.

  13 May. Somewhere I’ve always imagined living (and it pre-dates the Lyttelton–Hart-Davis letters where Hart-Davis’s Kisdon cottage is such a place) is a house on the southern-facing slopes of Wensleydale or Swaledale, a long house with barns attached and built into the hillside with a terrace in front that looks across the valley. Wilsill, where we were evacuated, was such a house, though quite low down in the Nidd valley. Now I gather from watching Aubrey Manning’s BBC2 series Talking Landscapes that such sites were not just my dream but a stock location for settlement since the Iron Age … some of them, of course, still inhabited sites but others abandoned, as he describes them, like a half-closed eye, a half-circle on the side of the hill where once a hut stood and behind it the banked earth, excavated for the platform. Even though we’re so happy where we are, I always dream of such a place, and of sitting in a chair outside the back door catching the last of the sun, the Proms on the radio, watching the few doings in the dale.

  18 May. Last week was Charlotte next door’s birthday and we give her a little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. It’s divided into subjects … Family, Age, Morals, etc. and I figure in several departments, though with the same lumbering extracts that are in the larger dictionary, few of which I would have thought memorable at all. Somewhere in Larkin’s interviews he speculates about the lines for which he will be remembered: ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963’ of course; ‘Books are a load of crap’; ‘Nothing like something happens anywhere’; and of course ‘What will survive of us is love’, though he professes to think most of what he’s written isn’t particularly memorable.

  I feel much the same, though I compiled a list a few years ago of what I thought was worth quoting and look it out to see what I think of it now, and though I don’t find any of them imprint themselves on the mind, they’re better than the ones in the ODQ.

  Legs always leave something to be desired, do they not? It is part of

  their function and all of their charm. (Wilde parody, Forty Years On)

  A butterfly is an event. (Forty Years On) That awkward gap between the cradle and the grave. (Getting On)

  When we are on our best behaviour we are not always at our best. (A Question of Attribution)

  Life is generally something that happens elsewhere. (Writing Home) (Also said by Milan Kundera, though not cribbed by me.)

  There is no such thing as false modesty. All modesty is false otherwise it’s not modesty. (Not included in anything so far.)

  Cheek, though not quite a virtue, belongs in the other ranks of courage. (Obituary of Russell Harty, 1988.)

  The good is better than the best or what does society mean. (The Old Country)

  If you have a secret there’s no point in making a secret of it. (The Old Country)

  Sooner or later in life everything turns into work, including work. (One of the prefaces to the plays, I think.)

  One of the functions of women is to bring an element of trouble into the otherwise tranquil lives of men. (The Lady in the Van)

  In England age wipes the slate clean. If you live to be ninety in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel Prize. (Single Spies)

  Still, my favourite lines, though, are ones which while having an internal consistency in the play in which they occur, when taken out of context appear utterly absurd, e.g.:

  ‘You can’t knit bootees for the Nicene Creed’, a line spoken by the Virgin Mary in Kafka’s Dick. And from the same play:

  MAX BROD: I need to go to the toilet.

  SYDNEY: Well, for God’s sake don’t do it over the goldfish or we’ll be entertaining the Brontë sisters.

  19 May, Yorkshire. Going into Settle this morning we pass a lorry at Austwick loaded with the carcasses of slaughtered sheep and find the main car park now given over to vehicles, bulldozers and all the paraphernalia of this dreadful travelling circus. Though for the soldiers and the slaughter-men the work must now be just a wearisome routine, cars still slow to watch the mounds of carcasses slither down the ramps and it’s hard not to think it’s but a step from this to the more terrible slaughters that go on in Eastern Europe. To date it has not quite come to our village, the cows on our two farms still unaffected, though a convoy goes through early this afternoon to start picking sheep off the fells.

  30 May. It’s a little life, my mother would say as my father killed a wasp or even an ant. Left to herself she was more predisposed in favour of some insects than others. To lift a plant pot and find it boiling with woodlice made her shudder, but to come across one on a solitary and hazardous trek across the fleecy rug was hardly a matter for revulsion and she would coax it onto a piece of paper before chucking it out of the door.

  A similar rescue operation would be mounted whenever she found a daddy-long-legs. These insects, both ungainly and unthreatening, somehow commended themselves to her and she would strive to catch them in her cupped hands before releasing them into the unwelcoming street, her capture and subsequent liberation of them sometimes involving the loss of at least one of their elaborate limbs so that Dad growled unhelpfully: ‘By the time she’s finished saving their lives they’re dead.’

  14 June, Yorkshire. Much in the local papers about how the ‘hefted’ sheep will not be easily restocked, having been born on the fells and thus bred up to know its ways and its weather. They keep (and teach their lambs to keep) to their own patch and do not wander at will. They lamb every year by the same sheltered wall, come lower down when they sense the cold is coming or a storm expected and all in all these sheep know a good deal and the farmers know that they know it. I wonder, though, if there are other things the sheep know which the farmers do not acknowledge. Do they know that their male lambs will be taken away a few months after they are born? Do they know or do they wonder where they are being taken on the vast two- and three-tier lorries that ship them halfway across the country to market? If they know so much by instinct perhaps that is not all that they know and they perhaps deserve to be treated differently on that account. In fifty years’ time I am sure that we will not handle animals the way we do now and to succeeding generations our behaviour will seem as barbarous as bear-baiting.

  The beginning of a film: a boy and a girl collecting branches in seventeenth-century costume, the day idyllic, the
pair of them in love, possibly.

  ‘Here’s a good one.’

  ‘Here’s a beauty.’

  They collect an armful of branches each and then hand them over to a jovial good-natured man who is stockpiling wood. It is for a public burning, the wood green to make it burn more slowly. The victim is already on the pyre. The boy and girl settle down to watch.

  26 June. En route home from the National we drive up Drury Lane and then on towards Camden Town. Waiting at the lights in Bloomsbury Square R. spots a fox, gaunt, grey and long-legged, seemingly waiting for the lights too. It then trots unhurriedly across. A tall elegant creature, old I would have thought, its delicacy and silence making it seem almost wolflike as it turns down a side street and vanishes into Holborn.

  1 July. Listen to Nick Hytner on Private Passions, Michael Berkeley’s always excellent programme, a superior and more interesting Desert Island Discs without its tiresome conventions. Most of Nick’s musical choices are quite spare (or ‘transparent’ as Nick calls them), not caring for music as a warm bath, which is generally where my musical appreciation stops. So there’s Handel, Janácek, Sondheim, Haydn and Britten and ending with a wonderfully slow and sexy rendering of ‘Bewitched’ by Ella Fitzgerald, with the words ‘I’ll sing to him, each spring to him/ And worship the trousers that cling to him.’

  Nick doesn’t mention the stories of singing as a boy in the choir with the Hallé under Barbirolli or how he was winkled out of Jewish prayers to bolster the singing of the Christian hymns, at Manchester Grammar School. But it reminds me of the stories as Nick told them to me and how vivid and touching they were, so after the programme I make notes to see if I can turn these anecdotes into a film.*

  9 July, Yorkshire. With there being so few visitors to the village and no walking in the countryside generally, even in this comparatively short space of time nature has reasserted herself. I’ve seen a deer bounding off the fell below Buckhaw Brow and A. has seen a couple. A heron comes to the garden now and W., who occasionally mows the lawn, has three times seen a kingfisher below the bridge. Meanwhile, uncropped and ungrazed, the fields look more and more unkempt and every gathering of cattle inspires dread. The vast mechanised farm just before the Skipton bypass is now silent so I imagine their stock has been culled. It’s such an ugly sprawling place with huge piles of tyres and rows of system-built hangars that it’s not easy to feel much regret. It’s more like a factory than a farm and hard to locate the actual farmhouse or to think there may be a family grieving there. Or not; the amounts of possible compensation said to be colossal.

  12 July. I’m brushing my teeth in the bathroom this morning when a little school passes – or a class anyway – on an outing, to the zoo probably. Ethnically mixed with Muslim women in headscarves in attendance, a couple of tired-looking teachers and young fathers too, one with a rucksack on and a child in either hand. A poor school by the looks of it as distinct from the two other schools in the neighbourhood (green-uniformed children delivered by four-wheel drives). But the simplicity of this little column, the tired goodness of it, reaffirms … what? A belief in common decency, is it, and hope, as the green uniforms and four-wheel drives do not? Though it’s hard not to think that against this trusting little column the four-wheel drives and the green uniforms will prevail.

  A mad letter forwarded by the BBC apropos one of my Telling Tales programmes. ‘I was intrigued by your references to certain Sexual Experiments which took place in your street-located Air Raid Shelter (but you didn’t mention the opposite sex?) Was it MB? Fellatio or Cunilingus (sic) … please put me out of my misery on the subject. But it turned me on. I had to MB.’ Odd to think of an old man wanking at the memory of an innocent short-trousered little boy playing in an air-raid shelter sixty-odd years ago.

  ‘She is frail but it’s deceptive: get her behind a supermarket trolley and she turns into Von Rundstedt.’

  16 August. It occurs to me at Brian Brindley’s funeral that one thing about the Catholic Mass is that it attracts and is open to anybody who just happens to be passing. There’s almost an ‘Ah, Bisto!’ aspect to it so that even at the smartest requiems there are these oddities who, not having anything better to do, have just wandered in. And that way, maybe, salvation lies.

  Another thought: the first requirement in any assembly is to be heard. I come home and tell Nora, my cleaning lady, about the Mass. ‘Oh, that’s a nice thing. I’ll always go to Mass myself. And I do believe in God and all that so that people would say I was very devout. But when you’re dead I think it’s a case of Bob’s your uncle.’

  3 September. Very much enjoy Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clapp’s Molly House at the NT. It has frequent references to ‘wandering’ … I suppose in the play it means cruising, though the simple boy in the first act seems to wander without knowing why or to what it might lead. This is like I was in my teens, wandering the streets of Headingley at night though without anything ever coming of it.

  Then I come across an article about Roger Mayne, the photographer, of whom it was said, ‘His eyes were wide open but he was a shy young man. It is the shy boy, not the streetwise, who goes wandering.’

  11 September. Working rather disconsolately when Tom M. rings to tell me to switch on the television as the Twin Towers have been attacked. Not long after I switch on one of the towers collapses, an unbearable sight, like a huge plumed beast plunging earthwards. I go to put the kettle on and in that moment the other tower collapses.

  15 September. Lynn in New York says that people in the city so want to be together they stand outside so that though New York is quiet there are many people on the streets, the atmosphere kindly and unthreatening, everyone courteous and not at all like New York. She had gone down to the Odeon when the first tower was hit and found the restaurant turned into a dressing station. She was out on the street when the second tower fell and had to flee the dust cloud, not stopping or looking behind her until she got to Canal Street.

  1 October. Meet on Leeds Station Brian P., to whose home in Cookridge I used to deliver meat as a boy. He and his brother went to the Grammar School but we knew each other at the Crusaders Bible class, where I was even more conscious of my lowly status as delivery boy. We talk of battling through the snow in 1947 and he remembers how the canyon through the snow on Cookridge Heights was cut by German POWs. The height of the chasm was that of a double-decker bus and along this towering passage the POWs cut out embrasures for seats, grottoes almost, for the good people of Cookridge. He pats me on the shoulder and says how much he has enjoyed my work, a pat which had it been administered when I was thirteen would have made my day.

  2 October. An obituary in today’s Guardian of the novelist and poet Amy Witting who taught her classes French by writing the words of Charles Trenet’s La Mer on the blackboard and getting the class to sing it. I see her … or a teacher in a play … pointing to a boy to take a line and maybe a young black boy whose voice hasn’t broken singing it perfectly.*

  4 October. To Robinsfield, the primary school in St John’s Wood where I sometimes go to read. I do some Winnie the Pooh but the poem they really like is Michael Rosen’s ‘Don’t’ (with the line ‘Don’t put mustard in the custard’). They spontaneously ask questions afterwards, where did I buy the book I’m reading from? What was the first book I ever read? What was the first book I wrote? A multi-racial school, the children so friendly and attentive to one another and so gentle it’s hard to see anyone even of the most extreme views withstanding such serious innocence. The teachers are plagued by the requirements of inspection and assessment, a party due round this very morning, the same time-wasting bureaucracy that clogs every institution in the country be it the National Gallery or a tiny primary school in north London. As I’m leaving one boy of mixed race who’s maybe five or six runs after me and asks if I have heard of a play called A Midsummer Night’s Dream and what is it about?

  10 October. A poor day ends badly when I take the rubbish out to find the dustbin slopping around with hal
f a dozen turds which had dissolved in the rain of the last three days to make a kind of shit soup. To actually shit in the dustbin must take some skill or maybe it’s a dog owner whose social responsibility stretches to picking up the mess but not to putting it in their own bin.

  Anyway I empty the water as best I can and manoeuvre the turds into a bag then change and wash every stitch of clothing I’m wearing. My mother, on the other hand, would have moved house.

  From this unsavoury episode I salvage an etymological distinction: shit I think of as the self-contained shapes; shite as what’s smeared round the sides of the bin.

  16 October. A lesson from life: when the dying want to give you something, take it.

  Gardening woman (to someone planting bulbs): ‘Can I say one word? Drifts. Drifts.’

  Coming up the escalator at Camden Town one catches its authentic smell: piss and chips.

  19 October. Reading, in bed chiefly, Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973) bought along with a dozen or so other copies as presents on the first night of Habeas Corpus in 1973.

  Some of the poems chosen reflect his own concerns, e.g. E. Nesbit’s ‘The Things That Matter’:

  I know so many little things,

  And now the Angels will make haste

  To dust it all away with wings!

  O God, you made me like to know,

  You kept the things straight in my head,

  Please God, if you can make it so,

  Let me know something when I’m dead.

  The Oxford anthology came out a few years before Larkin’s ‘Aubade’,