Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  ‘The heights of epiphanic beauty normally only encountered in the likes of Proust’ is another comparison, and equally unwarranted because there is no one more grounded in the everything that is the case than Proust. Once noticed, Sebald’s technique seems almost comic. ‘Never yet on my many visits … have I found anyone about.’ The fact is, in Sebald nobody is ever about. This may be poetic but it seems to me a short cut to significance.

  6 April, Yorkshire. The new organic shop in the village continues to do well, the walk down the lane to the Nissen hut always a pleasure even in the bitterest weather. There are sheep in the adjoining field, the occasional bull and (despite the bypass) a lovely feeling of open country. The shop has fresh-picked salad with more to be gathered while you wait, three or four kinds of apple plus sprouts on the stalk that look so sculpted and swag-like they could have inspired Grinling Gibbons. Today there are one or two customers in the shop. Everyone speaks, a little too readily for me sometimes, this friendliness engendered by the nature of the enterprise. It’s a kind of camaraderie biologique. In the same way, halted on my bike at traffic lights I will occasionally chat to another cyclist, cycling a similar undertaking with a creed and an agenda and its own esprit de corps de vélos.

  9 April. The Queen Mother interred.

  Scene: Windsor. A vault. A dusty coffin. A flagstone in the roof is drawn back and a new coffin is slowly lowered down beside it. The flagstone is replaced and there is silence. Voice from old coffin: ‘Y-y-y-you’ve t-t-taken y-y-your t-t-time.’

  5 May, Yorkshire. Michael Bryant has died, who I’d known was ill but had never enquired after, from superstition largely, hoping he would pull through. Sardonic, sceptical, tough, he was not an easy man to praise and so much a staple of National Theatre productions and so consistently good that when it came to honours, national or theatrical, he was overlooked. True, he got the CBE in 1988, but not the knighthood he deserved because he was too unshowy. As a young actor (e.g. with Judi Dench in John Hopkins’s Talking to a Stranger) I thought him dull but he got better and better, though it would have been hard to say so to his face. Not – emphatically not – a university actor like Jacobi or McKellen, he used to call me (not to my face) ‘College’ Bennett. His was a non-commissioned life and, of course, a straight one. The list of roles he took on and the productions he was part of are a history of the Old Vic and the National Theatre over the last forty years and the quality and sheer volume of his work bestowed on him a mantle of wisdom and experience no one else at the NT could touch.

  25 May. Thinking about Dudley M. since his death, I’m struck by how little was said at the time of his musical abilities. In particular his talents as a jazz pianist. This would have come as no surprise to him as his success as a comedian and subsequently as a movie star put his musical accomplishment in the shade; jazz became marginal.

  Something of a prodigy when young but with no specialist musical background, Dudley landed what I imagine was a strongly contested organ scholarship at Magdalen. He was a working-class boy but there was no trace of it in his voice or indeed of any class at all, though the fact that his parents had kitted him out with three Christian names may indicate their ambitions for him. This was a time, with boys anyway, when two initials were the standard, boys equipped with three more likely to be from a public school or one of the grander grammar schools. But he was D. S. J. Moore and without it being the least bit ‘put on’ there was nothing in his voice to betray that he was from Dagenham. This may well have helped at Magdalen, which was at that time socially quite smart as well as being academically grand, and though in later life he tended to represent his time at Oxford as uneasy and not altogether happy, he was popular and gregarious, taking part in college and university drama productions as both actor and musician.

  Modest and unassuming, he was immensely appealing and, of course, always very funny but with regard to his area of expertise never very forthcoming. Presumably he talked to fellow musicians about jazz and its techniques but it was not a subject that came up much when he teamed up with the rest of us in Beyond the Fringe. We all professed to like jazz, though it was not as modish as it had been for the generation of Larkin and Amis a few years before. Jazz was no longer the anthem of youth and disaffection. Now there was Elvis, Bill Haley and even our own Cliff Richard. Still, we would go along to hear Dudley play, particularly when Peter Cook’s The Establishment opened in New York, where Dudley alternated at the piano with Teddy (‘Fly Me to the Moon’) Wilson. But knowing nothing of its history or development and never having listened to it much, I was baffled and bored by jazz, while Jonathan Miller’s experience of it didn’t stretch much beyond undergraduate hops where it served as a background to his vigorous though uncoordinated attempts to jive.

  Perhaps because he was the youngest of the four of us, Peter’s lack of interest in jazz was the most obvious, though he would later have heard a good deal more of Dudley’s playing than Jonathan or I did. When in old clips of Not Only … But Also Dudley is seen playing or parodying jazz as the play-out at the finish, Peter will sometimes be standing by the piano with a sophisticated smile, clicking his fingers to what he hopes may be the beat. This was both a pose and a piss-take but it came closer to the reality than Peter would perhaps have liked to admit. Despite their long working relationship, he continued to know nothing of jazz and, like the condescending figure at the piano, always slightly disparaged it. His music was pop not jazz; he would have liked to have been a pop singer and fancied himself as such, hence his truly dreadful imitation of Elvis Presley.

  None of which is of much interest except to make plain that whatever the public’s appreciation of his musical talent, Dudley was nevertheless corralled for four years with three other performers who didn’t share his enthusiasm and then for ten or a dozen years more with Peter, who regarded his music as at best an interlude between the comedy. So when later in life with that slightly aggrieved air with which he discussed his early career Dudley complained of being unappreciated by his colleagues in Beyond the Fringe, this was partly what it was about. He was a very funny instinctive comedian but he was not a writer and, no good at one sort of language, he found that music, the language he was good at, was largely discounted. And when on chat shows and interviews he gave his always defensive account of himself, complaining of the inferior status he had been accorded, particularly by Peter, music was at the heart of it.

  Of course, words and music are not the only languages and at this time, when we were all in our twenties, what ranked him above the rest of us and indeed anyone I’ve ever come across since, was his sexual success. This, unlike his musical accomplishment, was the subject of constant discussion and enquiry and it was a topic on which, while not boastful, Dudley was always frank, informative and very funny.

  That Dudley, given the chance, could talk illuminatingly about music was brought home to me in almost the only conversation I had with him about jazz, when he explained the difference, as he saw it, between a good and an average performance. It had to do with the musical beat, which he told me to think of not as a brief and indivisible moment but as an interval with a discernible length, and a beginning, a middle and an end. The art of playing good jazz, he explained, was to try and hit the beat as near as possible to its ending.

  To musicians this may well be a truism but I had never come across the notion before, and it linked, as Dudley then linked it, with comedy timing in the theatre, where the same applies and which I did understand and practised, though instinctively.

  This conversation would have taken place in New York sometime in 1963 in the apartment which he was then subletting on Washington Square and where he also taught me to add a spoonful of water to the mixture of the scrambled eggs we invariably had for lunch. It was there too that, possibly in order to wean me off Elgar, he played me the long sinuous romantic theme that begins Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. Though I always add the water when scrambling eggs, I have never got much further with Bruckner and the opening
of the Seventh is still all I know.

  1 June, Yorkshire. I try out my new slug killer: a cane with a sponge tied to the end with which, dipped in a strong solution of salt and water, I douse the slugs. I’m not sure if it works as this morning there’s no trace of any of the dead. This may mean they’ve crawled home to lick their wounds or their corpses may have been eaten by the early birds. Another device is a big darning needle fixed to the end of a cane on which I impale the blameless creatures.

  11 June. Make notes for the Tate Britain sound guide, my chosen picture Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (or ‘The Carpenter’s Shop’, as I think of it). It’s one of those paintings – Holman Hunt’s Shadow of Death is another – when Jesus’s childhood or youth skids to a halt at some rather vulgar prefiguring of what is in store, in this case the boy Jesus snagging his hand on a nail and blood dripping onto his foot. What’s always struck me particularly about the picture is the glum boy on the right fetching in a bowl of water. He’s John the Baptist but I’ve always thought of him as like ‘the lad’ in my father’s butcher’s shop who was already working for his living while I was, like Jesus, a namby-pamby figure in a nightdress who had plainly never done a stroke of work in his life. Dickens disliked this Jesus figure, too, apparently, though with less justification as he was always inventing boys like this himself. As with so many Pre-Raphaelite paintings the feeling is one of impending doom with even Joseph a slightly sinister figure.

  4 July. The Home Secretary announces that because of ‘public concern’ (which probably means one article in the Daily Mail) he has decided to make it known that Dr Shipman will remain in prison for the rest of his life. This is not more than anyone, including Dr Shipman, can have expected but why announce it? Who benefits? All it does is satisfy the desire for revenge of the public (or the public as imagined by the Daily Mail). It seems sheer sadism and not for the first time I wonder if Blunkett would be a more liberal man if he were not blind.

  22 July, L’Espiessac. I did not think my hearing had deteriorated at all but at some relatively refined level it has, as at nights here I can no longer catch the sound of crickets. It is the sound most evocative of the South or any warm climate and on our first night I put down its absence to the usual suspects – mechanised farming, fertilisers, the decline of nature. But standing at the top of the steps yesterday night, R. asks me if I can hear the crickets and cannot believe that, the night tingling with the sound, I am deaf to it. I strain to hear … and I can catch the bark of a distant dog, a car on the road to Nérac and the dishwasher still going in the kitchen. But crickets, no.

  23 July, L’Espiessac. Hornets are building a nest in a tiny hole in the wall bordering the window frame of the pigeonnier where we sleep. And it is a nest, too, with the hornet and/or a colleague bringing pieces of straw which it draws into the hole and presumably incorporates into the fabric of the nest. I have never seen insects do this (except ants possibly), imagining that wasps and such creatures somehow extruded the materials for their nests as bees do for their hives. I have a strong impulse to disrupt the process, even stop up the hole with chewing gum but resist it. Another sunny warm day but with a strong wind that ruffles the lavender (and makes landing for the hornets tricky).

  1 August. Apropos Jeffrey Archer, I am rereading the Lyttelton–Hart-Davis letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat the pistol, therefore are essentially unscrupulous and unreliable.’

  30 August. A commercial for Carte d’Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have written. A family which includes the aged grandmother is having Sunday dinner. ‘Pass your father the potatoes,’ the mother says to the grown-up son. ‘He’s not your father,’ snaps the grandmother. ‘We never knew who your father was.’ There is an awkward silence, then the mother ushers the grandmother from the table saying: ‘Come along, mother, I’ll take you upstairs.’ On the way out of the room the old lady passes an open piano on which (this is the stroke of genius) she suddenly hits a petulant discord. The scene lasts all of a minute and is worth pages of dialogue. Why it’s advertising ice cream I’m not sure.

  26 September. A call from Channel 4 wanting to know if I’d like to be one of the participants in Celebrity Big Brother. In view of the status of previous participants I suppose this indicates that in celebrity terms I’m pretty low grade so I don’t say no immediately but ask my agent, Ros Chatto, to find out who else they have in mind. They smell a rat, of course, and won’t let on, promising only ‘someone quite high up in the music business’. (This turns out to be an ex-member of Take That, who eventually triumphs.)

  30 September, Yorkshire. Glimpsed in Crosshills, en route for Leeds: a young man in a wheelchair with a girl (-friend, possibly) on his knee, giving her a lift – the wheelchair playing the same role as the crossbar of a bike. I’ve never seen this before and find it cheering.

  1 October. I am reading Geoffrey Moorhouse’s book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It’s a campaign that would surely have changed the course of history and might even have deposed Henry VIII, though this was not the rebels’ aim. They hesitated, and the chapter in question will presumably explain why. I can scarcely bear to read it and put the book to one side. Meanwhile Bush edges daily closer to war and I can’t bear to read about that either.

  2 October. The bin men in Camden come on Mondays and Thursdays and on Mondays too comes the recycling lorry, taking away the weekly hoard of paper and glass. Ludicrously I assumed that these recycling men would (because greener) be a cut above the ordinary bin men. In fact it’s the reverse. The traditional crew is jolly, know me by name and call out if they see me in the street. They also close the gate and don’t leave any mess. The green men are unsmiling, wanting in any obvious conviviality, shove the crate back any old how and don’t close the gate. Green, in Camden anyway, isn’t necessarily nice.

  15 October. Insofar as Bush (and therefore Blair) have any strategy within Iraq it is to depress the condition of the people to the point where they rise up against their leader. It’s a deplorable policy on humanitarian grounds but it’s also historically unsound. Revolutions happen not when people are at their most desperate but when conditions are just beginning to improve. The best way to topple Saddam would be to send Iraq aid.

  24 October, Yorkshire. To Fountains on a day of tearing wind and sudden storms with skies periodically swept to a clear Mediterranean blue. The tower at Fountains never fails to surprise, the last two stages so tall that they stand clear above the top of the valley, and so look like a rather squat parish church surrounded by trees. Avoiding the Visitors’ Centre, we go in at the bottom gate where the bus from Ripon first deposited my mother and me c.1947. It’s half-term and the outer court is full of children and family parties, though never as busy as it must have been in its medieval heyday. In the slype, the passage next to the chapterhouse, we find traces of the original paint. (I am actually rather pleased that I know the word ‘slype’ – a slip, I suppose it means, or a short cut.) The passage doubled as sacristy and library and, having been protected from the weather, some of the stone is still painted the original greyish white that once covered most of the masonry. This is overlaid with black decorative lines that impose a pattern of painted blocks irrespective of and unrelated to the stonework underneath. It feels glossy, almost waxy and the thought that this is just as it was at the Dissolution nearly 500 years ago I find absurdly satisfying. As I’m stroking this paint I become aware of a small child cowering in an alcove, playing hide-and-seek, who obviously thinks I am mad.

  On the hill south of the main buildings is the Applegarth, where there are two yew trees, unvisited by any tourists but survivors of a group of seven such trees that had long been growing here in the twelfth century when a band of monks from St Mary’s at York camped out on this hillside before founding the abbey. That the yews h
ave survived both the building of Fountains and its dissolution and all that has happened since makes them more objects of wonder than the abbey itself. Since they are not highlighted or on any ‘trail’ I suppose my wonder has a touch of snobbery to it, too.

  31 October, New York. Upgraded to first on American Airlines, I am early down to Immigration, to be met by a large emerald-green bird, fully feathered and with an orange beak. It flaps its wings and motions me onwards. I take the creature, just discernible as a middle-aged woman, to be a loony and, always nervous at Immigration, remain firmly behind the yellow line. The bird gets extremely agitated, flaps both its wings and indicates that I should proceed through one of the few gates that are manned. I now realise it’s Halloween, though the festive spirit doesn’t extend to the guy in the booth, who is mean-faced, unwelcoming and possibly more pissed off than he usually is because he has had a whole day in the company of this demented barnyard fowl, which is now clucking up and down the waiting line of jaded travellers, all of them as mystified as I was. Still, compared with others I see later that evening in New York she’s a fairly low-level eccentric; there’s a man with a pan on his head, another dressed in (or as) a condom, hand in hand with two of the sperms he has presumably frustrated. None of them, though, seems much in party mood, the festivity almost an obligation.

  ‘Foreigners,’ says the cab driver of some other (normally dressed) group. ‘Europeans. Do you know how ya tell? They’re smoking.’

  Promotion to first class gives me my first experience of a pod, the extendable seat which is supposed to make sleep possible. In fact it’s about a foot too short for me and my feet hang off the end, the whole contraption not unlike a stationary version of the fairground Waltzer.