# 68
You probably need to have been going to
school in England
well before 1959 to feel fully ‘at home’ with all of the characters in Alan
Bennett’s memoirs and many of those in his plays. The audience for ‘People’ at the National Theatre last
Tuesday evening appeared to qualify on grounds of age, being predominantly grey
on top then the habitual beige, navy, brown or black everywhere else. Many were
undoubtedly subscribers to the National Trust and thus the very ‘people’ whom
Bennett’s Lady Dorothy would shortly be intent on keeping out of Stacpoole House. Neatly combed and instinctively polite we
shuffled to our seats grunting at each step and trailing a collective whiff of
eucalyptus-based embrocations. “Decay,” observes Lady Dorothy “is a kind of
progress.”
Our schooling in the 1950s instilled a habit
of obedience which we thought we had long ago overthrown but it has crept back
as we’ve aged. It came as no surprise to hear a woman announce to the row behind
us that, since she and her husband had been allocated un-adjacent seats, they
could be reunited if everyone ‘would just budge
along one.’ Sure enough, with only a mildly irritated flurrying of coats and
scarves and shopping-bags, the entire mid-section of Circle row ‘B’ shifted
themselves one seat to the left. We were Bennett’s people. All those years ago
we had sullenly accepted the need to ‘grow into’ over-size school blazers and belted
gabardine raincoats. Turning eleven, we had sported bright new school caps when
out and about with our parents and accepted an Osmiroid fountain pen as an
appropriate birthday present. Using it to strike a neat line under the date and
title on page one of our homework books we had gazed with horror on the inky
smudge becoming visible as soon as the ruler moved away.
Alan Bennett describes the reality of his
childhood as being “enclosed and uneventful” notwithstanding events such as his
family’s self-evacuation from Leeds on the day
war was declared in 1939. Alan had looked forward to the excursion as a
promised picnic but the family ate their sandwiches in the chaos of the city’s
bus station before travelling deep into the countryside to escape the aerial
bombardment many feared would begin as soon as Mr Chamberlain finished speaking on the wireless.
In fact, Leeds experienced relatively few
air-raids, leaving young Bennett to record that he and his school-friends had
been ‘famished for shrapnel’. And it’s shrapnel I find best describes the
penetration achieved by his observations. He never mocks or ridicules. He
skilfully lances the incessant prudery and pretence with which the English
middle-classes have surrounded their sexuality let alone their bodily fluids
and functions. His anger is sometimes evident but never caustic. His stories
build a whole picture, with the humour remaining incisive rather than raucous,
blunt, exaggeratedly surreal or confrontational. His remarks are restrained, apposite and
often dry but they cut to the heart of the matter, leaving the target scarred
but manifestly still intact.
Alan Bennett – awkward, northern and…err …acute.
I first became aware of Bennett’s work in
1963 when someone’s parents had an LP of ‘Beyond
The Fringe’. He was unmistakable as the Anglican vicar in Take a Pew, delivering a persuasively
meaningless sermon constructed entirely from commonplaces. In the sketch, Civil War,
he portrayed a government spokesman. When questioned about how they would deal
with a four-minute warning of impending Soviet nuclear attack if the call came
when Prime Minister Macmillan was not at Number Ten, he cheerfully replied,
“Well, we’d ask Lady Dorothy of course!”
Ah, Lady
Dorothy. Dorothy Evelyn
Macmillan, née Cavendish, daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire,
wife to the then Prime Minister and long term mistress to Lord Boothby – a fact
known to the press and all of Westminster but never mentioned in public. Lady Dorothy, her very name an echo from
a time when a Tory PM had not only attended Eton
with half the toffs in his cabinet but was actually related to the rest by
either blood or marriage.
Alan Bennett, as you might expect, does a
formidable line in Dorothy’s; Dorothy
Lintott in The History Boys, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole in People (both characters played beautifully by Frances de la Tour). With
the Talking Heads series of
monologues, he rather cornered the
market for dramas involving ‘ladies of a certain age’ (Patricia Routledge, Eileen
Atkins, Maggie Smith, Thora Hird...). Bennett notices in particular the vocabulary
and syntax of authentic speech. He doubtless keeps a notebook of overheard
snippets which will one day find a home in a piece of dialogue on the stage. Years
ago, two elderly women were sitting in front of him on a bus and one remarked,
“Her cat - you know, from next door - had one
of my tits this morning.”
Or, more recently, a new arrival at some
twilight nursing home was welcomed with the greeting, enunciated with the perfectly
patronising and mellifluous intonation of someone schooled in professional 'caring',
“You’re our first Kevin.”
Finding himself on one occasion ‘outed’ by
the Daily Mail for (apparently) not being
homosexual, Bennett explained to Mark Lawson of the BBC that he found it “…a
great blessing to be a writer because you think, well – I can always write it
down. And that does dull the pain, really.”[1] I like to imagine Alan Bennett and his
partner, Rupert Thomas, heading off to visit an ancient Saxon or Norman church
and pausing to eat their sandwiches, quietly, among long-forgotten names and
dates and benisons in the churchyard. Bennett tells of coming home one day to
find Rupert watching a production of Wuthering Heights on television.
“You’re rather like Heathcliff,” says Rupert
and Alan is pleasantly surprised until Rupert adds, “Awkward, northern and a
cunt.”
Mark Lawson has interviewed Bennett many
times for the BBC. Most recently, on Radio 4’s Front Row programme[2] Lawson
observed that the question ‘What is
history?’ has become a recurrent theme in Bennett’s work. “History Boys is about the teaching of
history, The Habit of Art about the writing
of biography … People about the
packaging of history…who gets to tell the story, who gets the last word.”[3] The temptation to illustrate this by running
together various lines of dialogue from People
and The History Boys is suddenly
overwhelming. Oh, go on then…
Irwin
Ours is an
easier faith. Where they reverenced sanctity we reverence celebrity; they
venerated strenuous piety; we venerate supine antiquity. In our catechism old
is good, older is better, ancient is best with a bonus on archaeology because
it’s the closest history comes to shopping.
Dorothy
I
particularly abhor metaphor. Metaphor is fraud. England with all its faults. A
country house with all its shortcomings. The one is not the other…I will not
collaborate in your conceit of country. It is a pretend England… I want
it the way it’s always been…not done up, not run down…just taken for granted.
When did that stop?
Mrs Lintott
History’s
not such a frolic for women as it is for men…
Dakin
I tell you
history is fucking.
Mrs Lintott
History is
a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is
history?
Rudge
History is
just one fucking thing after another.
Mrs Lintott
History is
women following behind with the bucket.
Lumsden
You see,
Lady Dorothy. There is no pollution
that time does not expunge, no affront that indifference will not embrace…
Dorothy I long for the decay of England. Then at least we could
stop blustering. England
at a standstill and this just another stately home…not evaluated, not made
special. Ordinary.[4]
In his Introduction to People[5]
Bennett notes that “When it came to
giving offence…I kept finding that I had been if not timid, at least over
scrupulous.” He had tried to imagine the National Trust as “entirely without
inhibition, ready to exploit any aspect of the property’s recent history to
draw in the public, wholly unembarrassed by the seedy or disreputable.” Very
soon, however, he found his imagination overtaken by real life. He points out
that his objections to some of the Trust’s marketing strategies “are not to do
with morals but to do with taste.” The chamber pots of celebrity urine he
invents as an attraction for Stacpoole House stem surely from the same
imaginative root as “those scraps of cloth on which the monks wiped their bums”
in The History Boys. Alan Bennett has
a reliable habit of making both history and his personal reminiscences witty,
surprising, clever, insightful and – at times - reassuringly basic.
[1] BBC Archive: interview with Mark Lawson, 06.12.2009.
[2] Front Row BBC Radio 4.
Broadcast 20.03.2013
[3] Mark Lawson, ibid.
[4] Irwin, Dakin, Mrs Lintott and Rudge appear in The History Boys. Dorothy and Lumsden are from People.
[5] People - with an introduction
by the author. Alan Bennett. Faber & Faber. London 2012
