Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  16 December. As I’m correcting the proofs of this diary the news comes of David Blunkett’s resignation. It’s hard not to welcome his departure, while at the same time deploring the manner of it: anyone hounded by the newspapers has my sympathy, even though in Blunkett’s case the leaders of the pack were the very papers he had courted. Scarcely has he cleared his desk when the judges in the Lords condemn the indefinite detention of foreign nationals as unlawful, a judgement which, it’s to be hoped, signals some sort of turning of the tide. Santa may call at Belmarsh if not at Guantánamo Bay.

  * Born in 1915, in 1996 he was very much alive (though hating his wartime nickname) and living in Paris. He died in 2005.

  * Then Home Secretary.

  * Many of John Williams’s tools and the diapered boards he painted on which to hang them are now in the carpenter’s shop at the entrance to Erddig, the National Trust house in North Wales.

  * When the case comes up in the magistrates’ court and the young man is in the dock, he manages, despite being flanked by two policemen, to get naked again and to streak across Parliament Square, generally displaying such a facility in stripping off that it’s hard not to feel that’s where his future lies. He turns out to be from Coventry, which is, of course, a place with some tradition of public nudity.

  * I later discovered that some of the film of Forty Years On had survived, though by accident; what is kept and what is scrapped still being hit and miss.

  * This turns out to be the beginning of The History Boys, which I write and Nick directs three years later.

  * This is The History Boys again.

  * Too late. He dies 4 November.

  * Except that it has also been suggested that Henry VIII had Aske hung in chains, thus condemning him to an even more lingering death, an incident that forms part of H. F. M. Prescott’s fine historical novel Man on a Donkey.

  * A reader (though not, I think, a well-wisher) wrote to the LRB to point out that the Hickeys were only having to repay money that had been wrongly awarded to them for board and lodging. Possibly, though, it’s a pity the Courts didn’t show the same zeal for justice in the first instance as they did for financial regularity in the last.

  * A reader of the LRB subsequently wrote in to say that what is also remarkable about the memorial is that on the back, facing the hedge, is a list of those who returned safely from the war.

  Theatre and Plays

  The Lady in the Van

  After Miss Shepherd drove her van into my garden in 1974 friends used to ask me if I was planning to write a play about her. I wasn’t, but twenty-five years later I have. There are plenty of reasons for the time lag, the most obvious being that it would have been very difficult to write about her when she was alive and, as it were, on site.

  ‘How can I write about her?’ says one of the Alan Bennetts in the play. ‘She’s there.’ And although the line was later cut it remains true.

  Miss Shepherd’s presence in the garden didn’t, of course, stop me jotting things down, making notes on her activities and chronicling her various comic encounters. Indeed, in my bleaker moments it sometimes seemed that this was all there was to note down since nothing else was happening to me, hence, I suppose, the plaintive denials that make up the last speech in the play.

  Still, there was no question of writing or publishing anything about her until she was dead or gone from the garden, and as time passed the two came to seem the same thing. Occasionally newspapers took an interest and tried to blow the situation up into a jolly news item, but again, as is said in the play, the ramparts of privacy were more impregnable in those pre-Murdoch days and she was generally left to herself. Even journalists who came to interview me were often too polite to ask what an (increasingly whiffy) old van was doing parked a few feet from my door. If they did enquire I would explain, while asking them to keep it to themselves, which they invariably did. I can’t think that these days there would be similar discretion.

  Miss Shepherd helped, of course, lying low if anybody came to my door, and at night straight away switching off her light whenever she heard a footstep. But though she was undoubtedly a recluse (‘Is she’, a neighbour once asked, ‘a genuine eccentric?’), Miss Shepherd was not averse to the occasional bout of celebrity. I came back one day to find her posing beside the van for a woman columnist (gender did count with Miss S.) who had somehow sweet-talked her into giving an interview, Miss Shepherd managing in the process to imply that I had over the years systematically stifled her voice. If she has since achieved any fame or notoriety through my having written about her, I suspect that she would think it no more than her due and that her position as writer of pamphlets and political commentator entitled her to public recognition or, as she says in the play, ‘the freedom of the land’.

  It was this imaginary celebrity – I think the psychological term for it is ‘delusion of reference’ – that made her assume with every IRA bomb that she was next on the list. A disastrous fire in the Isle of Man meant, she was certain, that the culprit would now target her, and had she been alive at the time of Princess Diana’s death she would have taken it as a personal warning to avoid travelling (in the van as distinct from a high-powered Mercedes) under the Pont d’ Alma. In the first (and much longer) draft of the play this obsession was examined in more detail:

  MISS SHEPHERD: Mr Bennett. Will you look under the van?

  A. BENNETT: What for?

  MISS SHEPHERD: One of these explosive devices. There was another bomb last night and I think I may be the next on the list.

  A. BENNETT: Why you?

  MISS SHEPHERD: Because of the Fidelis Party. The IRA may have got wind of it with a view to thwarting of reconciliation attempts, possibly. Look under the van.

  A. BENNETT: I can’t see anything because of all your plastic bags.

  MISS SHEPHERD: Yes and the explosive’s plastic so it wouldn’t show, possibly. Are there any wires? The wireless tells you to look for wires. Nothing that looks like a timing device?

  A. BENNETT: There’s an old biscuit tin.

  MISS SHEPHERD: No. That’s not a bomb. It’s just something that was on offer at FineFare. I ought to have special protection with being a party leader, increased risk through subverting of democracy, possibly.

  A. BENNETT: Nobody knows you’re leader of a party.

  MISS SHEPHERD Well, it was on an anonymous footing but somebody may have spilled the beans. No organisation is watertight.

  It’s said of Robert Lowell that when he regularly went off his head it took the form of thinking he could rub shoulders with Beethoven, Voltaire and other all-time greats, with whom he considered himself to be on equal terms. (Actually Isaiah Berlin, about whose sanity there was no doubt, made exactly the same assumption, but that’s by the way.) The Virgin Mary excepted, Miss Shepherd’s sights were set rather lower. Her assumed equals were Harold Wilson, Mr Heath and (as she always called him) ‘Enoch’ and I was constantly being badgered to find out their private addresses so that they could be sent the latest copy of True View. Atypically for someone unbalanced, Miss Shepherd never seemed to take much interest in the Royal Family, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh never thought of as potential readers. This did not mean, though, that she was a disloyal subject and on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee in 1977 there was only one flag to be seen in our well-to-do socialist street and that was in the back window of the van where only I could see it.

  To begin with I wrote the play in three acts, knowing, though, that these days this is not a popular format. Still, that’s how Miss Shepherd’s story seemed to present itself, the first act consisting of her life in the street and culminating with her driving the van into the garden; the second act was life in the garden (all fifteen years of it); and the third act the events leading to her death and departure. The trouble with this way of telling the story was that whereas there was movement built into the first act (the lead-up to her arrival) and movement in the third (her decline and death), Act Two simply con
sisted of her being there, parked in the garden and going nowhere, the only movement me occasionally going up the wall.

  A second draft condensed the material into two acts, and though the passage of time within the play was perhaps not as clear, the passage of time within the theatre was altogether more acceptable, an hour each way quite enough for me. As Churchill said, the mind cannot take in more than the seat will endure.

  Telling the truth crops up quite a bit in the play, what Miss Shepherd did or didn’t do a subject of some disagreement between ‘the boys’, as I tended to think of the two Alan Bennetts. They call not telling the truth ‘lying’, but ‘the imagination’ would be a kinder way of putting it, with Alan Bennett the writer finally winning through to make Miss Shepherd talk of her past (as she never actually did) and even to bring her back from the dead in order to take her bodily up to heaven (also imaginary).

  These departures from the facts were genuinely hard won and took some coming to, causing me to reflect, not for the first time, that the biggest handicap for a writer is to have had a decent upbringing. Brought up not to lie or show off, I was temperamentally inclined to do both, particularly as a small child, and though reining me in perhaps improved my character, it was no help in my future profession where lying, or romancing anyway, is the essence of it.

  Nor did my education help. One of the difficulties I had in writing The Madness of George III was that, having been educated as a historian, I found it hard ever to take leave of the facts. With George III’s first bout of madness the facts needed scarcely any alteration to make them dramatic and only a little tweaking was required, but even that I found hard to do. It was still harder to play around with the facts of Miss Shepherd’s life, although the only person to know how much I may have doctored her history is me. And actually, while I’ve obviously had to compress a good deal, I haven’t had to alter much at all. It’s true, though, that a lengthier account of the events leading up to her moving into the garden with the van would make this development less dramatic, and less of a turning point.

  What happened was that one night several of the van’s windows were broken by two drunks, an incident that occurs in the play. This meant that Miss Shepherd was now much more at the mercy of the elements, the faded cretonne curtains which covered one or two of the windows her only protection from the weather and from prying eyes. I had a lean-to down some steps at the side of my house and now ran an electric lead out to this hut, so that on cold nights she could go in there to keep warm. Inevitably she began to spend the night there on a regular basis, the van becoming part office, part wardrobe, a repository for her pamphlets and her clothes and the place where she would spend what she saw as her working day.

  As I write I see Michael Frayn walking up the street en route from his home to his office nearby, where he writes. Miss Shepherd’s routine was not very different, in this instance as in others mentioned in the play her life not as dissimilar from that of her neighbours as they would have liked to think. They had offices to go to and so did she. They had second homes and, having acquired a Robin Reliant, so did she, a parallel which Miss Ferris, the irritatingly patient (and somewhat jargon-ridden) social worker in the play, is not slow to point out. But with Miss Shepherd going to and from her sleeping quarters in the hut to her office in the van it meant that I got used to her crossing the garden in front of my window, so that when she did finally move in, bags and all, it was neither the surprise nor the life-changing decision (for both of us) that the play perhaps implies.

  Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers, so Miss Ferris is a composite figure. To begin with the social workers got short shrift, their only function in Miss Shepherd’s view to procure her concessions from the council: another walking stick, an additional wheelchair ‘in case this one conks out, possibly’ and (a dream she never attained) the electrified chair in which she saw herself moving regally through the streets of Camden Town.

  A composite, too, are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s. Married to the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, he regarded Miss Shepherd with a sceptical eye, never moderating his (not unpenetrating) voice when he was discussing her, though she might well be in the van only a few feet away. He, I’m sure, thought I was mad to let her stay. Still, he came to her funeral and as the coffin was slid into the hearse he remarked loudly as ever, ‘Well, it’s a cut above her previous vehicle.’

  Like Rufus in the play, Colin had little time for feminism. I once asked him if he was jealous of his wife’s literary success. ‘Good God, no. One couldn’t be jealous of a woman, surely?’

  Though the character of Underwood is a fiction, invented in order to hint at something unexplained in Miss Shepherd’s past (and ultimately to explain it), he had, certainly as regards his appearance, a basis in fact. When the van was still parked in the street the late Nicholas Tomalin and I had been mobilised by Miss Shepherd to push it forward a few yards to a fresh location. I wrote in my diary:

  As we are poised for the move another Camden Town eccentric materialises, a tall, elderly figure in a long overcoat and Homburg hat with a distinguished grey moustache and in his buttonhole a flag for the Primrose League. Removing a grubby canary glove he leans a shaking hand against the rear of the van in a token gesture of assistance and when we have moved it the few statutory feet he puts the glove on again, saying grandly, ‘If you should need me in the future, I’m just around the corner’ – i.e. in Arlington House.

  For all the doubts I voice about tramps in the play, when one comes across such a fugitive from Godot it’s hard not to think that Beckett’s role as social observer has been underestimated.

  I have allowed myself a little leeway in speculating about Miss Shepherd’s concert career, though if, as her brother said, she had studied with Cortot she must have been a pianist of some ability. Cortot was the leading French pianist between the wars, Miss Shepherd presumably studying with him at the height of his fame. Continuing to give concerts throughout the Occupation, he finished the war under a cloud and it was perhaps this that sent him on a concert tour to England, where I remember seeing his photograph on posters sometime in the late forties. Perhaps Miss Shepherd saw it too, though by this time her hopes of a concert career must have been fading, a vocation as a nun already her goal.

  Her war had been spent driving ambulances, a job for which she had presumably enlisted and been trained and which marked the beginning of her lifelong fascination with anything on wheels. Comically she figures in my mind alongside the Queen, who as Princess Elizabeth also did war service and as an ATS recruit was filmed in a famous piece of wartime propaganda changing the wheel on an army lorry, a vehicle my mother fondly believed HRH drove for the duration of hostilities.

  What with land girls, nurses, WAAFs, the ATS and Wrens, these were years of cheerful, confident, seemingly carefree women and I’d like to think of Miss Shepherd as briefly one of them, having the time of her life: accompanying a singsong in the NAAFI perhaps, snatching a meal in a British restaurant, then going to the pictures to see Leslie Howard or Joan Fontaine. It was maybe this taste of wartime independence that later unsuited her for the veil, or it may be, as her brother suggested, that she suffered shellshock after a bomb exploded near her ambulance. At any rate she was invalided out and this was when her troubles began, with, in her brother’s view, the call of the convent a part of it.

  I would have liked her concert career to have outlasted the war or to have resumed after the duration, when the notion of a woman playing the piano against psychological odds was the theme of the film The Seventh Veil (1945), with Ann Todd as the pianist Francesca and James Mason her tyrannical stick-wielding Svengali. Enormously popular at the time (and with it the Grieg Piano Concerto), the film set the tone for a generation of glamorous pianists, best known of whom was Eileen Joyce, who was reputed to change her frock between movements
.

  The Seventh Veil was subsequently adapted for the stage and I still have the programme of the matinee I saw at the Grand Theatre in Leeds in March 1951. The Grieg Concerto had by this time been replaced by Rachmaninov Number Two and James Mason by Leo Genn, but it was still Ann Todd, her guardian as ever bringing his stick down across her fingers as she cowered at the keyboard.

  If Miss Shepherd had ever made it to the concert circuit this would be when I might have seen her, as I was by now going every week to symphony concerts in Leeds Town Hall where Miss Shepherd would have taken her place alongside Daphne Spottiswoode or Phyllis Sellick, Moura Lympany, Valda Aveling and Gina Bachauer – artistes with their décolleté, shawl-collared gowns as glamorous and imposing in my fourteen-year-old eyes as fashion models, Barbara Goalens of the keyboard, brought to their feet by the conductor to acknowledge the applause then sinking in a curtsy to receive the obligatory flowers just as, in memory anyway, Miss Shepherd does in the play.

  When I wrote the original account I glossed over the fact that Miss Shepherd’s death occurred the same night that, washed and in clean things, she returned from the day centre. I chose not to make this plain because for Miss Shepherd to die then seemed so handy and convenient, just when a writer would (if a little obviously) have chosen for her to die. So I note that I was nervous not only of altering the facts to suit the drama but of even seeming to have altered them. But that night or in the early hours of the morning was when she did die, the nurse who took her to the day centre (who wasn’t the social worker) saying that she had come across several cases when someone who had lived rough had seemed somehow to know that death was imminent and had made preparations accordingly, in Miss Shepherd’s case not merely seeing that she was washed and made more presentable but the previous week struggling to confession and Mass.