Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  16 August. The best films on TV are often in the middle of the day and at lunch time. Today it’s The Stars Look Down (1939) with Michael Redgrave, which I would have seen in 1940 in one of Armley’s half a dozen picture houses. Like How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green (1945), it’s the story of a working-class boy bettering himself through education and outgrowing his roots. They were none of them great films but they should figure in any account of the origins of the Welfare State as powerful myth-makers, particularly in our household where their message was taken for gospel, the value of education as a means of rising above one’s circumstances never questioned. So, trailing back from the Picturedrome in that first year of the war, we thought Michael Redgrave and Roddy McDowall were real heroes in whose footsteps my parents hoped my brother and I would one day tread.

  7 September. Watch a documentary about Wodehouse, geared to the publication of the new McCrum biography. Though there’s some private newsreel footage there’s nothing that hasn’t been in previous programmes nor does it come to any different conclusions – namely, that Wodehouse was an innocent, unworldly figure who behaved foolishly over the famous broadcasts but no more than that. This was the verdict of an official inquiry which, had it been published at the time (c.1949), would have cleared his name and he would have been rehabilitated much earlier than he was. Or so the programme claims.

  I’m not so sure. His famous innocence must have been pretty impregnable not to know by 1940 that there was more to Nazi Germany than a lot of bores dressing up in uniform and going round saluting one another. Did his wife, the notoriously canny Ethel, not read the papers either? Their unawareness doesn’t hold up even as the programme proclaims it, since it shows the Wodehouses making attempts to get away from their home in Le Touquet but turning back because of the number of refugees on the road, the columns dive-bombed by Stukas. Did the Wodehouses witness this or is it just stock programme padding? If they did it must have come home even to them that this was serious stuff.

  I start off, though, at a disadvantage in that, inspired though his language is, I can never take more than ten pages of the novels at a time, their relentless flippancy wearing and tedious. I am put off, too, by the Wodehouse fans, particularly since they’re pretty much identical with the cricketing tendency. Waugh is entitled to call Wodehouse a genius but even with Waugh there’s some feeling of self-congratulation at being the one to point it out. Nor does it help that Muggeridge was such a fan and the general chappishness of it all.

  No, I’m not an impartial judge, though in the actual business of recording broadcasts for American listeners and then finding that they’ve been broadcast to England Wodehouse seems scarcely culpable at all. Newspapers pull that sort of trick all the time.

  16 September. Some of my irritation with the Commons pro-hunting protestors is antiquarian: that these callow young men should have been the first to invade the floor of the House of Commons since Charles I seems vandalism not so much of the Commons itself as of tradition, the more so because it’s in aid of such an ignoble cause. Though I feel much the same about another vandal, Lord Falconer, and the scrambled abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor.

  About the sport itself Nancy Mitford, no opponent of hunting, was both perceptive and unsentimental:

  The next day we all went out hunting. The Radletts loved animals, they loved foxes, they risked dreadful beating to unstop the earths, they read and cried over Reynard the Fox, in summer they got up at four to go and see the cubs playing in the pale green light of the woods; nevertheless more than anything in the world, they loved hunting. It was in their blood and bones and in my blood and bones, and nothing could eradicate it, though we knew it for a kind of original sin. For three hours that day I forgot everything except my body and my pony’s body … That must be the great hold hunting has over people, especially stupid people; it enforces absolute concentration, both mental and physical. (The Pursuit of Love)

  The most sensible approach would have been to ban stag hunting and hare coursing as soon as Labour got into power. Both are barbarous and indefensible, except if you’re Clarissa Dickson Wright, who presumably feels her casserole threatened. But what a feast of humbug it is in every department. ‘We do what we like. We always have and always will. That’s democracy.’

  20 September. I am having my lunch outside the front door (salad of lettuce, beetroot, tomato and brown bread spread with olive paste) when Jonathan Miller passes en route for rehearsals at Covent Garden. He asks me what I’m reading. It’s actually re-rereading, and telling him he would hate every page I show him James Lees-Milne’s Through Wood and Dale. I ask him what he is reading and he shows me The Origins of the Final Solution. Both are unsuitable books and, as I say to him, we would each of us derive more benefit if I were reading his book and he mine. My book is cosy, comforting and I know everything in it; his book is just as familiar and, though hardly cosy, is consoling, too, both of us happiest reading what we know already.

  11 October. Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the MS of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in manuscript and the rest as printed in the LRB. Opening the box, Andrew remarks that it’s a long time since he’s seen one of these, manuscripts nowadays generally coming in the form of a floppy disk. For my part I hope they don’t notice the smear of jam on the box, the odd grease spot and even the faint odour of old milk, a consequence of the manuscript being put regularly in the fridge for safekeeping whenever we go away. I used to keep my manuscripts in boxes on the floor of the kitchen but about twenty years or so ago I had a burst boiler which flooded the kitchen and ruined half of them. I told Miss Shepherd, then living in her van, of this disaster. ‘Oh dear,’ she said mustering what she could in the way of fellow-feeling. ‘What a waste of water.’

  16 October. Three former Nat West bankers in court over charges to do with the collapse of Enron and due to be extradited for trial in Texas. This doesn’t get much coverage in the papers, with none at all in the Independent and in the Guardian confined to the business pages. Nor, I imagine, will they receive much sympathy generally, bankers, whether innocent or guilty, not having much appeal. But that we now have regulations that allow the United States to bundle away whomsoever it chooses for trial in America without needing to show any cause at all or even set out the evidence seems a monstrous erosion of civil liberties and one that has passed into law virtually unnoticed. That such a procedure, designed to expedite action against supposed terrorists, should straight away be used against defendants who are not terrorists at all points up its dangers. The legislation is, of course, not reciprocal, British courts having no such rights in the United States.

  20 October. Memorial services apart, it’s quite seldom that I see other writers, authorship not a particularly convivial profession. This does mean, though, that it still retains some of the glamour with which I invested it when I was young.

  When I first got a room in college at Oxford it was on the staircase where a Professor Dawkins was in residence. Now old and crippled, as a young man he had known and been duped by Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, the author of Hadrian VII, a book which in 1955 I had just read. I knew even then that it would be inappropriate (‘not cool’ I think would be today’s term) to mention this to Professor Dawkins when I overtook him labouring up the stairs but I regarded him with awe.

  Nevill Coghill was a Fellow of Exeter and he was dining in one night with a guest when I happened to be sitting low down on the scholars’ table and so quite near the dons. I could hear every word of a (fairly one-sided) conversation the guest, a man with a harsh, quacking voice, was having with Nevill. It was Auden, still fairly smooth-faced, though already in carpet slippers and in Oxford to deliver his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry.

  These literary connections will seem commonplace today but
I was still young enough then not quite to believe that authors inhabited the same world as ordinary mortals, still less secondary school boys from Leeds, and so in this respect I did find Oxford immensely glamorous. Around this time I got talking to an Old Exonian, Joel Sayre, who had known Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – as of course it was perfectly possible to have done in terms of time, Fitzgerald only having died fifteen or so years before. But it was worlds apart, not years, and I couldn’t believe that the world of the author of The Great Gatsby could conceivably overlap with mine. And though I’m more sophisticated now some of this wonder happily remains, a persistent pleasure in life, even at seventy the feeling that one is still a small boy seeing giants.

  21 October. This evening to Camden Town Hall for a meeting of the planning committee which will decide whether the new Kentish Town Health Centre gets the go-ahead. My doctor, Roy Macgregor, whose vision it is and who has spent the last ten years getting the scheme to this point, feels it may now fall at the last fence. Certainly he’s at the end of his tether, though the public gallery is full of staff and patients like me, all of whom wish the scheme well. It’s a crowded agenda and though the meeting starts at seven we don’t reach the Health Centre project until after half past nine, the previous proceedings of mind-numbing tedium, leaving one both wondering why these councillors choose this as a way of occupying their time and grateful that they do. Eventually a planning officer presents our scheme but it’s virtually inaudible; the opposition to it, chiefly from some local residents, is articulate and straightforward, so that though Roy makes a good and passionate speech it seems we shall lose. But when eventually at twenty past ten the vote is taken, against all expectations the building is accepted and we come out jubilant.

  At one point I nearly blot my copybook when a councillor claims that the model is an inaccurate representation of the development because the trees are shown as too tall. ‘But trees grow, haven’t you heard?’ I mutter far too loudly, wondering how Repton or Capability Brown would have fared before Camden Planning Committee. ‘When will the trees reach this height, Mr Brown? In fifty years’ time? That’s an optimistic perspective surely?’

  25 October. Due to go to Venice and Bologna for a week’s holiday I damage an Achilles tendon which makes walking difficult and Venice impossible. Instead we take a slow and stopping journey northwards, calling first at Burford in Oxfordshire to look at the church. I must have been before but have no recollection of it, particularly the unexpected Romanesque core of the building which from its Perpendicular exterior seems like a typical fifteenth-century wool church.

  At first the heart sinks to find the nave has lost its pews and is now filled with blue upholstered conference chairs arranged in a tell-tale semicircle. That churches should show any interest in God at all always puts R. off but there’s plenty here to outweigh any children’s cornery, particularly the early seventeenth-century Tanfield tomb where the free-standing angels above the columns are perched on pediments that are in fact breasts (nipple downwards). The memorial tablet to Edmund Harman, Henry VIII’s doctor, is even more extraordinary, with figures in relief which are among the first representations of Native Americans but which seem less of the sixteenth than the early twentieth century and could well be mistaken for sculptures by Eric Gill.

  27 October. We call at Stokesay Castle. It’s an English Heritage property, as one might deduce from the sheet of paper torn from an exercise book and stuck on the gate of the car park: ‘Closed today and tomorrow’. It’s exactly the same at a later stopping point, English Heritage’s Haughmond Abbey, only this time the torn sheet of paper reads: ‘Closed till next April’. English Heritage curators are an eccentric lot, which I don’t mind except that they seem to open and close their properties on a whim, ‘Well, it’s half-term’ the probable excuse.

  Still there are compensations, as denied access both to Stokesay Castle and Stokesay Church we wander round the graveyard and come upon the war memorial. It’s of a soldier, solid and even squat, looking as much French as English, and though it’s strictly representational it has something of Vorticism about it, like a three-dimensional version of the figures that populate the paintings of William Roberts. There’s a reluctance about the soldier, too, the heaviness of the figure more to do with resignation than any eager embracing of the military calling. One of my fellow conscripts in the army used to maintain that the pose of soldiers on war memorials only made sense if you thought of them as just having been caught skiving. And certainly this soldier hardly looks keen and definitely not noble. I’ve often wished there was a comprehensive study of war memorials even if it were only in the form of a register; they go largely unnoticed in guidebooks and I’ve never seen this stocky little squaddy reproduced. It’s anonymous, too, with what seems like the name of the sculptor carved on the side of the plinth more probably an overflow from the list of the dead that fills the front.*

  8 November. Sitting in the barber’s chair this afternoon I wonder whether there were barbers in Auschwitz, Jews who were put aside before being killed to cut the hair not of the other Jews but of the officers and guards, and what such a barber’s might have been like. One could see a film opening like this, a man in the chair covered by a sheet while a thin, nervous barber puts the finishing touches to his hair, holds up the mirror, dusts the back of his neck, then takes the sheet off to reveal someone in SS uniform.

  These thoughts are occasioned by my barber, who is Moroccan or Algerian, not Jewish, but is thin and delicate and quite nervous, too, but much to be preferred to his two colleagues because he has very little English and so does not expect me to talk.

  Also in the barber’s chair I think about Alec Guinness. I don’t know where he had his hair cut but it was probably somewhere in Mayfair, Trumper’s possibly, or wherever smart, upper-class men go these days. Knowing Alec I imagine there would be a large tip, over-tipping his way of coping with his social unease. The tip would be so large and Alec so bald it would probably have been possible to put a price on each individual hair.

  14 November. Appropriately for Remembrance Day I am reading Assault Division by Norman Scarfe, a history of the 3rd Division from D-Day to the surrender of Germany, first published in 1947 and here reissued (Spellmount, £20).

  Norman, now eighty and our leading local historian, particularly of East Anglia, was at the time of writing not much more than a schoolboy. He’d spent a year at Oxford before he was called up and at twenty found himself a gunnery officer attached to the 3rd Division in the first wave of landings on D-Day, firing his guns as the incoming tide lapped around his boots. He stayed with the division all that last year of the war, then went back to Oxford, where he wrote this book in the intervals of doing undergraduate essays on medieval history.

  Military history so soon after the war was more tight-lipped than it subsequently became but the young Scarfe’s exuberance keeps breaking in and with his jokes and digs and exclamation marks he’s like a new old boy writing back to his school magazine. It’s a humbling book, though, and an inspiring one, some of it unbearable to read, particularly the action on the first few days: Sherman tanks up-ended in the waves, drowning their helpless crews, and the beach raked by machine-gun fire from the shabby seaside promenade. Who now would willingly walk into such a hail of bullets and without recrimination?

  I’ve always thought acting and soldiering had much in common though I hadn’t realised it ran to a common interest in the reviews. Some units (and whole armies) were persistently unsung, with journalists then as now incapable of the proper ascription of credit, opting for the showy (e.g. Lord Lovat’s arrival with his piper) rather than the death-defying slog that preceded it. This youthful book is both magnanimous and fair but later histories and memoirs were not so understanding and there would be much hoovering up of credit, not least by Montgomery himself.

  It was this second Second World War, the fighting as seen through the prism of the 1950s and the films and clichés that came with it, that we were satiri
sing in Beyond the Fringe. By that time the understatement that comes naturally to Norman Scarfe and the earliest chroniclers had turned into a trope, a specious and self-deprecating gloss applied to the many movies made about the war, and which nowadays seem comic.

  With death everywhere this dry, factual book brings back the reality, as Remembrance Day and its attendant commemorations never entirely do, the sentiments attaching to these solemnities enlisted in whatever conflict we’re engaged in. This year both Blair and the fox-hunters are keen to dabble us in the long-spilled blood. ‘This was the freedom they died for.’ No, it wasn’t.

  15 December. Handy hints: a garage I go to occasionally in Ilkley has a box of coppers by the till. If you’re short of a penny or two you take some from the box and, though there’s no obligation, if you get the odd penny in change you put it back. I am as happy getting rid of the odd penny as taking one since the end result is the same, reducing the amount of copper in one’s pocket. With many bottles of unused coppers at home I wish this practice was more widespread.

  Apropos shopping, I note that this year Sainsbury’s profits have fallen. I have played a small part in this as I am increasingly reluctant to visit their Camden Town store, a grey, dingy steel and glass structure designed by Nicholas Grimshaw, who, in order to make room for his little bit of Danzig, demolished a pleasing and easily convertible Art Deco bakery that was previously on the site. Visiting the store has always been lowering to the spirit, though alleviated somewhat by an old-fashioned flower stall outside the back door, kept by a mother and daughter and where one could always buy posies of anemones. It persisted for some years until Sainsbury’s itself decided to sell flowers (though not anemones), the mother and daughter lost their pitch, I lost any incentive to shop there and Sainsbury’s profits fell accordingly. Did I know about economics, all this could probably be expressed in the form of an equation.