Untold Stories Read online

  Untold Stories

  ALAN BENNETT

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  Untold Stories

  Written on the Body

  Seeing Stars

  The Ginnel

  Diaries 1996–2004

  Theatre and Plays

  The Lady in the Van

  The National Theatre

  The History Boys

  Radio and TV

  Hymn

  Cheeky Chappies

  The Last of the Sun

  Thora Hird

  Lindsay Anderson

  Art, Architecture and Authors

  Going to the Pictures

  Spoiled for Choice

  Portrait or Bust

  Making York Minster

  County Arcade, Leeds

  A Room of My Own

  Denton Welch

  England Gone: Philip Larkin

  Staring out of the Window

  Ups and Downs

  A Common Assault

  Arise, Sir …

  An Average Rock Bun

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Illustrations

  1 My father, aged twelve

  2 St Bartholomew’s Church, Armley

  3 & 4 My parents, shortly before they were married

  5 Grandma Peel

  6 Grandad Peel

  7 Dad, on holiday as a young man

  8 Mam and Gordon with Aunty Kathleen

  9 Aunty Myra

  10 Jordy and Ossie

  11 Aunty Kathleen in manageress mode

  12 Otley Road, 1950

  13 Among the marigolds in Grandma’s garden, Gilpin Place, 1947

  14 Dad in the Otley Road shop

  15 Mam on an outing with Somerset Maugham, 1952

  16 Joint Services School for Linguists, Cambridge, 1953

  17 With Mme Chernysheva in the garden of Salisbury Villas, Cambridge, 1953

  18 Self-portrait, Oxford, 1955

  19 The Drinking Party, BBC TV, 1966 (left to right: Roddy Maude-Roxby, AB, John Fortune, Leo McKern, Barry Justice, Michael Gough)

  20 With Dudley Moore and Joan Collins in Arnold Weissberger’s bedroom, 1963

  21 With Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, Beyond the Fringe, 1962

  22 Yorkshire

  23 In Christopher Fry’s garden, 1992

  24 With Rupert Thomas and Madge Hindle, Venice, 1996

  25 L’Espiessac, 1997

  26 L’Espiessac, 1997

  27 With Harry McNally, New York, 1985

  28 With Lynn Wagenknecht, 1987

  29 Rupert, Fountains Abbey, 1999

  30 Palazzo S. Justina, Venice, 2001

  31 Miss Shepherd, 1989

  32 The Lady in the Van (left to right: Kevin McNally, Maggie Smith and Nicholas Farrell)

  33 Leeds Modern School, 1952

  34 J.S.S.L., Bodmin, 1954 (left to right: AB, Michael Frayn, David Thompson, P. B. Naylor)

  35 The History Boys, 2004 (left to right: Jamie Parker, Dominic Cooper, Samuel Barnett, James Corden, AB, Andrew Knott, Samuel Anderson, Sacha Dhawan, Russell Tovey)

  36 Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour in rehearsal

  37 Exeter College, Oxford Staircase 5:6

  38 Exeter College, Oxford Staircase 9:11

  39 Leeds Town Hall

  40 George Fenton (and one of Miss Shepherd’s vans), 1974

  41 Mam and Dad, 1970

  42 County Arcade, Leeds

  43 The Masons’ Loft, York Minster

  44 Templets (sic) in the loft

  45 1953

  Introduction

  At Christmas when I was a boy and hung my pillowcase at the end of the bed one of the presents I could generally count on was an annual. The comics that I read weekly throughout the year all produced a Christmas annual. There were Dandy and Beano for me, who was the youngest, Knockout, Wizard or Hotspur for my brother, three years older. Annuals, which were also albums, had a long tradition, stretching back to the Edwardian Chatterbox, and even in the wartime 1940s the books were still quite substantial and in gaily decorated hard covers with a medley of strip cartoons, stories and games that kept us absorbed well into the new year, when they could be swapped for other children’s annuals.

  The appeal of such compendium books was not confined to the young; there were adult annuals, the most notable (and still a staple of second-hand bookshops) The Saturday Book with poems, short stories, paintings and autobiography, a revue in book form. The fashion for such adult versions seems to have gone out but I imagine there are children’s annuals still, or a version of them. I hope so, as for me they were the beginning of childhood reading, and memories of the feel and smell and the excitement of those Christmas volumes come back to me as I write.

  So if I have a model book it is not Jane Austen or Dickens or Evelyn Waugh; it is one of those long-forgotten annuals which lured you on from story to story through pictures and puzzles, a real box of delights. And it is my memories of such volumes that reconcile me to the seemingly scrappy nature of this one. There are no cartoons and few pictures, and it is a mixture of autobiography, diaries, lectures and occasional writings that could at a pinch have been sorted out into two less variegated volumes, autobiography, say, and the rest. But on the model of those childhood annuals long ago I’m happier to see them jumbled together. I’ve a feeling there was indeed a comic called Jumble. Or was that just William’s dog?

  That’s part of it, but there is other stuff in the book which, while I was writing it anyway, I did not expect or want to see published in my lifetime. I had no objection to it being read; I just didn’t want to be in the room at the time.

  What changed my mind on this was being diagnosed with cancer in June 1997, and having what I was told then was only a fifty/fifty chance of recovery. Though I made no particular secret of it, I didn’t go public on my illness as these days tends to be the mode, thinking that if there was time I would write about it. This in due course I did, the account included in this book under the title ‘An Average Rock Bun’.

  I had regarded some of these writings as tidying up, topics I’d been wanting to write about but had never got round to. A death sentence, like moving house, meant that the tidying up had to be done and done quickly: there was a deadline. My earlier misgivings about what I was prepared to see published in my lifetime now seemed almost laughably irrelevant: none of it was likely to be published in my lifetime, so where was the problem?

  To be told you only have a short time to live makes any notion of self-preservation of scant importance, death mocking dignity and reputation, the important thing just to get as much as you can down on paper. (And it was paper in my case, not a screen.) The threat of death, provided it’s unaccompanied by diminished energy, can be a laxative and so it was with me. Now I could write what I wanted and leave the question of publication to my executors.

  I had not felt particularly cooped up in hospital. There was a good view over to some trees on a hill and playing fields which I took to be part of Harrow School, and sometimes I saw a hawk swooping low over the flat roofs of the hospital. As soon as I could I started going downstairs to sit on a seat near where the cars were parked, a bleak-seeming picture such as might figure in a poem by Larkin, though it did not seem especially bleak to me.

  I found, though, that in the months that followed I was spending every moment that I could out of doors, very often sitting in a long chair outside my front door in Camden Town. It was a place I had not had much say in previously, occupied as it was from 1974 to 1989 by Miss Shepherd and her van. Even after she died I could not bring myself to sit there, not out of piety but because there was no shelter from the street, and anybody coming past the
house was able to see me as they had been able to see her. In my newly straitened circumstances this was another consideration that ceased to matter.

  After I began a course of chemotherapy which entailed two days in hospital every fortnight this urge to be in the open air became a compulsion, and every day I took my place outside my door like a passenger on an ocean liner. I skipped the bouillon but everything else was to hand: books, writing materials and a large straw hat, the chair itself a present from my agent, Rosalind Chatto. Fortunately it was a warm and tranquil autumn, though even on the greyest of days I still lay out in the chair, only rain driving me indoors; I would even sit out on the step in the evening.

  Before I had been taken ill (though I never felt ill) I had begun work on some autobiographical sketches, the connecting thread the suicide of my grandfather which went unmentioned in the family for more than forty years. These were to be entitled Untold Stories, an extract from which was published in the London Review of Books in September 1999.

  Even had I been able to, I felt it was inadvisable for the moment anyway to try and write a play. The process invariably ties me in knots and, who knows, maybe that was what had brought on the trouble in the first place. Besides Untold Stories, though, I wanted something I could fairly effortlessly scribble down as I sat outside convalescing so I began a series of slightly chattier reminiscences. These came easily, and not having expected to see the enterprise brought to a conclusion it was a surprise when I found I had assembled a batch of a dozen or so memoirs, which were then recorded for BBC TV and published as Telling Tales.

  Unfortunately the programmes passed almost unnoticed and the book similarly. Had I said more about being ill and the impending curtailment that caused the memoirs to be written there would, I’m sure, have been more attention paid and sympathy extended. But cancer is not a career move, and I kept quiet, which, since I’m still here, turned out to be the right thing to have done. Had I done otherwise I might have died of embarrassment.

  My continuing presence in the world meant, though, that the decision about the supposedly posthumous chapters which I had thought to shuffle off onto my executors remained my own. However, in the meantime there had been another development.

  In 2001 I had been the subject of a somewhat speculative biography, written without my co-operation and with little help from my friends and acquaintances. Knowing there is not much to be done to prevent such an enterprise, I had given the author no help but not made much of a fuss about it. When the book came out it was thought to be kind but dull, not unlike its subject, with the author complaining rather forlornly about how little help he’d received in his self-imposed task. Still, it was the publication of this book that made me press on with my own autobiographical efforts and start thinking of them as pre-posthumous.

  Lastly, my continuing remission from cancer coincided with a long period in which I found myself unable to write … or certainly to write plays. It’s true I finished The Lady in the Van in 1999, but that was really something I’d prepared earlier. After that, though, nothing much seemed to occur, and it may be that the so-called battle against cancer, which in ‘An Average Rock Bun’ I tend to disclaim, took more out of me than I was aware and that the suppression of the growth which that may have involved was a shutdown all round. Autobiography, though, was different, and with no plot needed and the story given it seemed almost therapy.

  Most of the other stuff reflects my interests and occupations. Diaries and autobiography apart, there are a couple of lectures on art, given when I was a Trustee of the National Gallery; the last monologue I wrote for Thora Hird, and an account of recording it; and some writings on visiting churches, a hobby I had as a boy and have taken up again now that I’m getting on and have someone to visit them with.

  But there is little here that doesn’t have something to do with one or another aspect of my life. I might have preferred to tell it differently – in the form of plays, say, or fiction – but this album is a quicker if less face-saving way of doing it.

  ‘Pass it on,’ says Hector in The History Boys. ‘Just pass it on.’

  Untold Stories

  There is a wood, the canal, the river, and above the river the railway and the road. It’s the first proper country that you get to as you come north out of Leeds, and going home on the train I pass the place quite often. Only these days I look. I’ve been passing the place for years without looking because I didn’t know it was a place; that anything had happened there to make it a place, let alone a place that had something to do with me. Below the wood the water is deep and dark and sometimes there’s a boy fishing or a couple walking a dog. I suppose it’s a beauty spot now. It probably was then.

  ‘Has there been any other mental illness in your family?’ Mr Parr’s pen hovers over the Yes/No box on the form and my father, who is letting me answer the questions, looks down at his trilby and says nothing.

  ‘No,’ I say confidently, and Dad turns the trilby in his hands.

  ‘Anyway,’ says Mr Parr kindly but with what the three of us know is more tact than truth, ‘depression isn’t really mental illness. I see it all the time.’

  Mr Parr sees it all the time because he is the Mental Health Welfare Officer for the Craven district, and late this September evening in 1966 Dad and I are sitting in his bare linoleum-floored office above Settle police station while he takes a history of my mother.

  ‘So there’s never been anything like this before?’

  ‘No,’ I say, and without doubt or hesitation. After all, I’m the educated one in the family. I’ve been to Oxford. If there had been ‘anything like this’ I should have known about it. ‘No, there’s never been anything like this.’

  ‘Well,’ Dad says, and the information is meant for me as much as for Mr Parr, ‘she did have something once. Just before we were married.’ And he looks at me apologetically. ‘Only it was nerves more. It wasn’t like this.’

  The ‘this’ that it wasn’t like was a change in my mother’s personality that had come about with startling suddenness. Over a matter of weeks she had lost all her fun and vitality, turning fretful and apprehensive and inaccessible to reason or reassurance. As the days passed the mood deepened, bringing with it fantasy and delusion; the house was watched, my father made to speak in a whisper because there was someone on the landing, and the lavatory (always central to Mam’s scheme of things) was being monitored every time it was flushed. She started to sleep with her handbag under her pillow as if she were in a strange and dangerous hotel, and finally one night she fled the house in her nightgown, and Dad found her wandering in the street, whence she could only be fetched back into the house after some resistance.

  Occurring in Leeds, where they had always lived, conduct like this might just have got by unnoticed, but the onset of the depression coincided with my parents’ retirement to a village in the Dales, a place so small and close-knit that such bizarre behaviour could not be hidden. Indeed it was partly the knowledge that they were about to leave the relative anonymity of the city for a small community where ‘folks knew all your business’ and that she would henceforth be socially much more visible than she was used to (‘I’m the centrepiece here’) that might have brought on the depression in the first place. Or so Mr Parr is saying.

  My parents had always wanted to be in the country and have a garden. Living in Leeds all his life Dad looked back on the childhood holidays he had spent on a farm at Bielby in the East Riding as a lost paradise. The village they were moving to was very pretty, too pretty for Mam in her depressed mood: ‘You’ll see,’ she said, ‘we’ll be inundated with folk visiting.’

  The cottage faced onto the village street but had a long garden at the back, and it seemed like the place they had always dreamed of. This was in 1966. A few years later I wrote a television play, Sunset Across the Bay, in which a retired couple not unlike my parents leave Leeds to go and live in Morecambe. As the coach hits the M62, bearing them away to a new life, the wife calls out, ‘By
e bye, mucky Leeds!’ And so it had seemed. Now Dad was being told that it was this longed-for escape that had brought down this crushing visitation on his wife. Not surprisingly he would not believe it.