Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Also in the photograph is a red lacquer tea caddy, spotted in a junk-shop window as I was coming into Lancaster on the bus when I was about fifteen. I got off, ran back and bought it for five shillings and this, too, I still have, some dusty leaves of fifty-year-old tea a relic of that time. Next to it is a grey-and-blue mocha mug, also extant, and a Staffordshire dog which got the elbow (or the Charles Ryder treatment) sometime in the sixties. I note, too, that even I had succumbed to the lure of record sleeves – one of them, I believe, with a photograph of Prague, at that time an unvisitable place.

  As a boy I felt myself a bit of an oddity for being drawn to such objects as those I now displayed on my college mantelpiece, as it was an interest unshared with any of my school friends. However, I’d been encouraged while I was in the army by reading (partly as an antidote to army life) the Denton Welch Journals. The standard taste of the time was for insipid Georgian, but Denton Welch was more passionate and idiosyncratic than that and had an unashamed fascination with what he could turn up in wartime junkshops about which he wrote vividly in his diaries.

  Oxford was still full of such shops then, and though I never ventured into the better class of antique shop on the High Street, there were plenty of others. Down Little Clarendon Street was Kyril Bonfiglioli, a colourful character, now I think revealed as possibly a spy and certainly an accomplished detective story writer. He sold me for a few pounds a little oil sketch of an Oriental market that he thought might be by W. J. Mueller (of whom I had never heard). Years later I took it into the Fine Art Society in Bond Street, where a young man glanced briefly at it before saying kindly, ‘Ye-es. Well, Mueller painted some bad pictures, but I am afraid this is not one of them.’ I’ve had other such humiliations down Bond Street which, in many different ways, I’ve come to regard as a street of shame.

  I bought the supposed Mueller because it was a dark little painting with something of a glow about it and this reminded me of the glass paintings I liked at the time. Impossibly expensive today, the historical subjects, The Death of Nelson, for instance, or The Trial of Queen Caroline, were not cheap then but religious subjects could be picked up for a few pounds. Some were more votive than others – sickly depictions of the Virgin, say, or mawkish representations of the saints – but in others the strength of the colours and the primitive crudities of the style offset the, to me, slightly distasteful fact that these were in effect Stations of the Cross.

  I stayed on at Oxford after I took my degree and in due course got larger rooms for which I could even buy furniture. Over Magdalen Bridge and just up the London road on the left, I bought a Victorian marble-topped chiffonier (£6) which is still in my kitchen today. In 1958 it had to be taken up the High Street on a handcart. The rooms I then had were at the end of Exeter’s Broad Street building, my bedroom looking over the emperors to the Sheldonian and the Clarendon Building.

  Where taste was concerned I never went through the Damascus-road experience like that occasioned in Charles Ryder by Sebastian Flyte, undergraduates who already knew what they liked being quite rare. One such, though, was Brian Brindley, with whom I overlapped at Exeter and whose much-reported death occurred last year in typically spectacular fashion when he collapsed in the middle of his seventieth birthday dinner at the Athenaeum. Brian’s taste was for Soane and the Gothick, and his rooms were crowded with religious images and (though I did not know the word then) bondieuserie.

  He was an outrageous figure, kinder than he would have liked you to think, but witty, camp and a bit of a bully. He once called on me at the top of Staircase 5, the call a mark of significant social favour and like a visit from Lady Bracknell. What I had done to my rooms can’t have been to his taste at all but among my sparse possessions he spotted two blue Bristol-glass dishes, liners from some long-vanished salt cellars. He begged one from me in order to use it as an incense burner, and so overawed was I by this arbiter of taste that (though it had not been cheap and they were, after all, a pair) I gave it to him. I still have its fellow, and somewhere among the exquisite clutter of his Brighton flat (for his taste had not altered a jot since he was an undergraduate) languishes, I imagine, its twin.

  No other personality that I came across was as colourful as Brindley or with such pronounced tastes, though mention of Brighton recalls John Morley, who was Director of the Royal Pavilion and Museums there. He, too, was an undergraduate at Exeter, though slightly younger than me and every bit as precocious and dogmatic in his tastes as Brindley. They both drew witty and elaborate Gothick extravaganzas in the college Suggestions Book rather like ecclesiastical versions of the Punch cartoons of Emmett. These days I feel there would not be time for such silliness, and talents so notable would already be being turned to profit or self-promotion. Then it simply seemed fun. Half a morning could be spent elaborating some confection in the Suggestions Book that only a few undergraduates would see and smile at. It was a community as enclosed and unworldly as a medieval monastery.

  After I took my degree I stayed on at Oxford to do research in medieval history, and also taught a little. I now had rooms in Merton Street, the back looking over to the Botanic Gardens. Some of my pupils were already collectors and possessed of a good deal more expertise than I ever had. David Bindman, later Professor of Art History at University College, London, was a pupil and would show me old master drawings he had picked up for a song, and another pupil, Bevis Hillier, later the biographer of John Betjeman and writer on the arts generally, would fetch along ceramics; I knew little of either and could neither confirm nor deny the confident attributions both boys put forward. But they taught me a more useful lesson than I ever taught them, namely that my own taste was for surfaces.

  I was no collector. I cared more for the look of an object than for what it was. My aim was to make a room look interesting or cosy. I didn’t see paintings as art objects so much as objects in a setting, and had the unashamedly English notion of pictures as furniture. I preferred them above tables, behind flowers, say, dimly lit by lamps or even half hidden by books. I would never want a room in which a painting was spotlit; it smacks too much of a museum, or a certain sort of gallery.

  It is for these reasons that almost my favourite museum is the Fitzwilliam at Cambridge. It has too much on the walls and there is furniture besides, but it adds up to just the kind of inspired clutter that has always appealed to me. When I was stationed in Cambridge in the fifties I used to go there on Saturday afternoons out of term when the museum (and the town) was virtually empty.

  The first room I would head for was on the right at the head of the stairs. There were some grand pictures but they were mostly English paintings then – a portrait of Hardy by Augustus John, some Constable sketches and Camden Town paintings and, presiding over them all, another Augustus John, a portrait of Sir William Nicholson. He’s in a long thin black overcoat, hand outstretched resting on his stick, urbane, disdainful and looking not unlike the actor in the films of the time who played Professor Moriarty to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t even know then that William Nicholson was himself a painter; what it was I admired was his detachment and his urbanity to the extent that the first chance I got I bought a thin second-hand black overcoat which made me look as spidery as he did.

  If I like the Fitzwilliam for its clutter, I also like another Cambridge museum for its lack of it, though Kettle’s Yard is not a museum at all but the home of Jim Ede, who gave it to the university in 1966. It caters to all my notions of art and interior decoration; the paintings (Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis), while individually delightful, are integral to the overall decorative scheme, even starting at the skirting board; nowhere else have I seen pictures hung so close to the ground. Jim Ede, too, thought that paintings were not always best seen undeflected: ‘I remember how in Arezzo,’ he writes, ‘I went to see the Piero della Francescas, and saw nothing but an old faded curtain by an open window making shadows across the pictures.’

  And so it is at Kettle’s Yard, the p
aintings part of an assemblage and subject to the changing light. There’s a mixture of old and modern furniture and though I don’t always like the stones and objets trouvés on top of tables and chests (the decorative charms of pebbles and driftwood for me strictly limited) and though I would never paint a room white… here the whole house glows.

  I would be happy to live in Kettle’s Yard, feeling that if I did my life would be better, or at least different. It passes one of the tests of a congenial interior, that you feel you would like the food that is cooked there. At Kettle’s Yard you can practically smell it.

  Denton Welch

  A good subtitle for a biography of Denton Welch might be A Bike in the Hedge, so much are his leisure and his journals taken up with picnicking in fields, looking round country churches or exploring the overgrown parks of once grand houses. The bike would not be locked, as this was Kent in the 1940s, a county (though it had seen the Battle of Britain) still sunk in rustic tranquillity and seclusion.

  June 7 1943 Monday I am sitting in the cool in Capel Church under the mediaeval fresco. Against a dim salmon pink ground two figures seem to be hanging long coats out of the window of a castle turret. Other figures seem to be banqueting.

  He had been banqueting too.

  I have been eating my lunch in the fields nearby (Ryvita, cheese, apricot jam, chocolate bar of squashed dried fruits, coffee) sitting on my coral air-cushion, given me by May, reading for the fourth or fifth time an outline of the Brontë sisters’ lives.

  Having just had his first book published he identified with Charlotte and the prospect of fame. Earlier, not untypically, he had been watching a loutish boy picking cherries and another mowing a field.

  This is what goes on in nineteen forty three, the year of the greatest war to stop all wars, if I have the quotation right. Now I shall leave this cool church and this mediaeval fresco and get on my bike again.

  This may be read about in years to come and then people will know about what I did on this June day.

  There was no forgetting what he had been doing on the same June day eight years before. Then his bike hadn’t been in the hedge but crushed on a Surrey road when, as a young art student, he’d been knocked down by a car, the injuries condemning him to the life of an invalid and leading ultimately to his death in 1948 at the age of thirty-three.

  Tough, single-minded to the point of selfishness and often difficult to live with, he raged against the turn of fate that had wrecked his life, and though it’s tempting to say that without it he would not have been a writer, I’m not sure this is true. From early childhood, as James Methuen-Campbell’s book makes plain, he seems to have had a particular slant on the world and though his accident may have concentrated his energies it did not create his sensibility. A child who at the age of seven could remark ‘in a slow, earnest, thoughtful voice that “a flea would despise the amount of lemonade I’ve got, Mother”’ was never going to be ordinary, and his experiences with his family in China made their contribution. After holidays spent rooting through the junk shops of Shanghai and on a solitary walk coming across a severed human head in the undergrowth, it’s hardly surprising he failed to fit in at Repton.

  When Denton Welch began to write such occurrences were not slow to find their way into his stories and novels, which were nothing if not autobiographical. What the accident did was add urgency to the process, and though he regularly complained of how little his circumstances allowed him to accomplish, by the time of his death he had accumulated a substantial body of work and acquired a distinctive voice.

  To begin with I knew nothing of his fiction, first reading about him when his journals were published four years after his death. In those days I could afford few books, certainly in hardback, and so wrote my name in them as I seldom do nowadays. My copy of the journals is also dated, with ‘December 1952’ written in my still-childish hand. This was a few months after I had been conscripted. Utterly unlike any person I had come across, I felt he was a sympathetic voice and – a characteristic of books read when young – seemed to be speaking particularly to me. So I took the book with me into the army as, I suppose, a token of a different sort of life, a ‘civilised life’ I probably thought of it then, though it was nothing like the life I’d known.

  The military life meant regular kit inspections, your army belongings, boots, best BD, mess tins, etc. all laid out on the squared-off bed. Nor was it just the army side of things that was on display, as your locker had to be open too, your whole life available for scrutiny should the inspecting officer so choose. I imagined the journals being flicked open by a disdainful swagger stick at some offending page and read out with sarcastic comments for the benefit of the other conscripts.

  Still, his work wasn’t entirely unsuited to the barrack room, particularly during the war years, a time when reading (and writing) became almost an act of faith. Servicemen reading on barrack-room beds were testifying to their conviction that there was a world elsewhere. The early paperbacks slipped handily into the outside BD trouser pocket, as did Horizon or Penguin New Writing, and reading James Methuen-Campbell’s account of his life it almost seems as if even Vogue was a light in the darkness. So though Denton Welch took and prided himself on taking no notice of the war, wartime and the austerity that followed were the time of his life.

  In this regard, though, it’s a blessing that his accident banished him from the metropolis. How much less idiosyncratic would his life have been, certainly to read about, had he landed up in Soho or Fitzrovia, the doings of which, particularly in that period, are amply documented and over-described.

  Kent, where he spent most of his invalid life might seem dull by comparison, but had much to recommend it. The setting of Samuel Palmer’s valley of vision, now with its evidences of war, was one of those evocative landscapes that Piper and Ravilious were recording elsewhere. But the war didn’t interest Denton Welch, not in its scenic aspects anyway, and it never obtrudes onto his own canvases; no Nissen huts here or surrealist barrage balloons, no bomb damage even, his paintings resolutely personal and obscure (and not always very good).

  But his journals are a different matter. Minor writers often convey a more intense flavour of their times than those whose range is broader and concerns more profound. Here the war is met with at every turn, but transmuted into an idyllic pastoral of soldiers bathing, prisoners harvesting and planes crossing the moonlit sky to the sound of distant singing from the pub. As drunken servicemen ride their girlfriends home on the handlebars, Welch’s diaries sometimes read like the script for a documentary by Humphrey Jennings or notes for a film by Michael Powell.

  In a letter to Barbara Cooper, secretary to John Lehmann, in October 1943 he gives his hobbies as ‘old glass, china, furniture, little pictures and picnicking alone’ and, though Ryvita has never had much charm for me, lovingly detailed as one of the ingredients of his wartime picnics even that gritty dimpled cardboard acquires glamour. Dashing off on his bike to antique shops (the prices absurdly cheap), exploring churches and dilapidated follies – to me in 1952 he sounded to have an ideal life. And a smart one, too. To a boy brought up in the provinces this ailing ex-art student seemed to have moved effortlessly into a charmed circle, with letters from E. M. Forster, lunch with Edith Sitwell and tea at Sissinghurst with Harold and Vita. It was probably only her suicide that stopped Virginia Woolf from figuring here.

  What I didn’t appreciate then was the guts Welch must have had and needed to have. At eighteen I thought that to be ‘sensitive’ was a writer’s first requirement – with discipline and persistence nowhere – whereas he never allowed himself to languish. His spinal injuries no more kept him off his bike than sickness and high temperatures did from the typewriter, and it was this no-nonsense approach both to his disability and to his work that made him impatient of those occasional fans who sought him out expecting a wilting aesthete.

  For the same reason he would probably have been uneasy to find himself on so many sensitive bookshelves in the
late forties and fifties, when books said more about their readers than they do now. His writings would be found alongside such textbooks of proscribed affections as Housman’s poems, the novels of Forrest Reid and Mary Renault and (as a chronicle of unhappy love) The Unquiet Grave: coded texts that spoke more plainly than their owners sometimes wanted or even knew.

  Certainly much of what Denton Welch wrote trembled on the brink of sex, which gives it much of its energy, though in the journals it is never plain whether anything ‘went on’. In 1952 I assumed he was of necessity exercising discretion, but, as James Methuen-Campbell makes clear, often catheterised and racked by his physical inabilities, Denton Welch was very much an onlooker and non-participant. But at eighteen I was an onlooker and non-participant myself, so that probably rang bells too.

  In the description of the closeness between himself and his companion Eric Oliver, what I found reassuring was his frankness about the intensity of their association, at least on Welch’s side… and one-sided associations were the ones with which I was myself familiar. And he plainly wasn’t shy. Sitting chatting to naked boys in hay fields seemed fairly unshy to me, though the mixture of his knowingness and their seeming naivety was typical of the times and would not last. By the sixties it’s not only the Nissen huts that have gone, but an innocence too.