Keeping On Keeping On by Alan Bennett
Then to film in Leeds itself, at Allerton High School where, en route, we pass a tableau that I have never actually witnessed but which is nevertheless familiar: in the back garden of a council house a small pavilion has been set up and two figures in the white suits of forensic experts are lumbering in and out of the house. It’s a crime scene, though Jamie, the cheeky grip, suggests it could be quite a small wedding. When we reach the school they tell us it’s a thirty-year-old man, an old boy of the school, who has been charged with murdering his father.
There is much family history round the walls of the old-fashioned classroom, with photographs of relatives brought in by the class, and mounted on card with an account of the person pictured. Quite a few are of personnel from the Second War whom I take to be the children’s grandparents, though as often as not they’re their great-grandparents. This is a Jewish area so there are photographs from the ghettos of Poland and tsarist Russia and stern patriarchs from India and Pakistan. One child ends an account of her grandparents: ‘They have been married for 48 years and still get on like a roof on fire.’
13 July. What captures the imagination about the four bombers is that when they split up at King’s Cross only minutes before they knew they would be dead they were, according to the tapes, chatting and joking as if off on holiday. It’s this gaiety and unconcern which makes all the talk of a War on Terror and the nation’s resilience seem beside the point. It’s Thomas More joking on the scaffold, except that More wasn’t taking anyone else with him. But how can mere self-preservation prevail against such unconcern? This debonair going to their (and our) deaths beyond understanding and made so, too, because it would, in any other circumstances, be admirable.
Blair addresses the House of Commons where there is not a dissentient voice and thus it is inevitably described as the Commons at its best. It’s actually at its most solemn and cowardly with no one daring to step out of line or suggest that without our subservience to Bush we would not be in this mess. George Galloway, for whom I otherwise don’t have much time, tries to say this on Newsnight but is shouted down by an almost frenzied Gavin Esler, though the point Galloway is making – that while nothing can be done about the perpetrators themselves, the circumstances that have fed their fanaticism have to be addressed – is a perfectly sensible one and ought to have been raised in the House of Commons. Instead MPs are far too busy rising to the occasion, which for Blair is: ‘Let’s pretend it’s the Blitz and bags me be Churchill.’
Meanwhile contrast our leaders cowering behind the barriers at Gleneagles with HMQ who, two days after the bombings, drives down the Mall in an open car.
28 July. It’s now reported that the dead Brazilian boy Jean Charles de Menezes was not wearing a bulky jacket, did not jump over the barrier, but went through on his travel card. Who made these excuses – which is what they were – at the time of his shooting? Was it the police? And if so will the inquiry reveal it? (It has, after all, three months to do its work when it could surely have reported earlier.) But some of the papers, which print these corrections pretty obscurely, feature on the front page photographs of nail bombs supposedly found in the bombers’ car. So what one finds oneself thinking is that if the death on Stockwell Station can be deliberately misrepresented why should not also the existence of the nail bombs? It’s the Blair lies factor again. And, of course, ‘the adrenaline was flowing.’
4 August. One has grown accustomed to – inured to would I suppose be nearer the truth – T. Blair’s use of supplementary adverbs, ‘I honestly believe’, ‘I really think’, which diminish rather than augment his credibility. It’s always sloppy but sometimes offensive. A propos the shooting of Mr de Menezes the prime minister says: ‘I understand entirely the feelings of the young man’s family.’ No ordinary person would put it like this. The only way Mr Blair could ‘understand entirely’ the feelings of the young man’s family would be if Euan Blair had been hunted down Whitehall, stumbled on the steps of Downing Street and he, too, had been despatched with seven shots to his head. Then Mr Blair would have had that entire understanding to which he so glibly lays claim, the claiming, one feels, part of his now developing role as Father of the People.
7 August. Jonathan Miller is a good neighbour, if only by default. He often ranges the Crescent on the lookout for someone to talk to thus incidentally noticing anything untoward. Today it is two men who go into my garden while their companion, a woman, waits outside the gate. They are actually having a pee and when J. remonstrates on my behalf, they turn out to be Australian. One of them apologises but the other is unrepentant, complaining that ‘you Poms’ are too fixated on the penis and what does it matter urinating in public? As for the garden it will act as fertiliser. J. unwisely tries to put the discussion on a higher plane, pointing out that there are issues of public decorum here and saying that so far as his genitals are concerned, the Australian in question presumably wouldn’t be happy walking down the Crescent with his trousers down. ‘Oh yes, I would,’ and to prove the point he drops his shorts to reveal a substantial dick which he displays to the Doctor and anyone else passing. ‘And what’, persists J., ‘would your girlfriend think?’ ‘Oh, I’d be quite happy,’ says the girl – the dick in question presumably the source of some happiness already. Jonathan considers taking the argument about public decency a step further, and instancing the work of Norbert Elias, but thinks better of it and the Australians, who are possibly in a bad mood because (unknown to J.) they have just lost the Test Match, go on their way.
Hunting is killing for fun, e.g. Ronald Blythe in Borderland recalling Bewick stoning a bullfinch as a boy:
‘I felt greatly hurt at what I had done and did not quit it all the afternoon. I turned it over and over admiring its plumage, its feet, its bill … This was the last bird I killed.’
Let the hunter reach the fox before the hounds get at it and hold it in his/her arms and read from its dying eyes, ‘Why have you taken away my life?’ ‘For fun’ is their answer.
30 August. I sit here in the shade on a boiling afternoon waiting for the bike to come from Faber with the first copy of Untold Stories. Dinah W. at Faber says it’s as big as the Bible, which dismays (and which I wouldn’t have thought would help sales). Still, it’s only £20 (Writing Home ten years ago £17.50), which seems reasonable. The doorbell goes and when I open the door I find on the doorstep not a cycle courier but an angel out of Botticelli’s Primavera, white-robed, garlanded and with ropes of flowers in her hair. It is Tracey Ullman, who is making a film down Inverness Street (‘The way one does’), and who is just calling to show off her costume, the function of which in the film is never satisfactorily explained. I offer to escort her back, as even today such a figure walking through Camden Town might cause comment. But she has come the two hundred yards or so by car, the studio chauffeur waiting with the Daimler to ferry her back. Tracey gone I resume my wait and the book arrives about four.
10 September, Yorkshire. We blackberry along Wandales Lane, the (possibly pre-) Roman track below the fells on the eastern side of Lunesdale. The blackberries on the sun-facing side are now so ripe they are quite hard to pick, but the bushes on the other side are laden with heavy, moist but not overripe fruit, so we soon gather enough for three or four jars of thick juice – ‘coulis’ posh restaurants would call it. We end up, though, with our hands stained red, which brings back a film of the 1940s which scared me as a child. Jennifer Jones has been involved, perhaps unwillingly, in a murder, a situation anyway in which her hands are covered with blood. This sends her off the rails (‘traumatises’ her as would be said nowadays) and the memory is buried. She then comes into the care of, and possibly marries, Joseph Cotten and seems fully recovered and leading an ideal life in the country. Then – fatal move – one day she goes blackberrying and the predictable happens: Joseph Cotten finds her screaming and hysterical with her hands covered in blackberry juice. What happens in the end I can’t remember, maybe the incident is ‘therapeutic’, though it wasn’t for m
22 September. Nice elderly cashier at the check-out in M&S. ‘I did agree with what you said in the paper about the shops closing in Parkway and it being all estate agents.’
I thank her and say how much I miss the Regent Bookshop, there being nothing at all now to enliven the upper reaches of Parkway or tempt one to go that way home.
‘Oh, I agree. And I always had a soft spot for that bookshop. It was there my little granddaughter had her ears pierced.’ And it’s true they did used to do ear piercing, though quite why I’m not sure.
24 September. Good à propos Kate Moss’s alleged cocaine abuse to be reminded of the cowardice of commerce. The Swedish firm H&M, one of several fearless enterprises that have distanced themselves from Ms Moss, declares itself proud to be in the forefront of corporate morality. That most of its clothes are said to be made dirt cheap in China is beside the point.
Actually I wouldn’t know Kate Moss if I fell over her.
29 September. Among several things that the ejection and charging of Mr Walter Wolfgang from the Labour Party Conference demonstrates is the danger of endowing the police with any more powers than they have already. For shouting out ‘Liar’ he is charged under the Terrorism Act. The silencing of hecklers was hardly the act’s original purpose but it is just the handiest blunt instrument available. This should be remembered in the next session of Parliament when the police are asking for yet more powers – three months’ detention for instance – while at the same time solemnly assuring the public that they will only use such powers when the occasion demands it. This is a promise soon forgotten. If they have the powers they will use them – young Muslim or Jewish old-age pensioner it makes no difference. ‘You’re nicked.’
30 September. Keith M. tells me of a TV script that is currently doing the rounds in New York in which four Muslim bombers are holed up together and keep receiving orders from their al-Qaeda superiors to carry out suicide missions. They are terrified of their bosses but are all cowards and most anxious to avoid committing suicide. It’s apparently very funny but no TV company has dared to buy it and they are currently trying to set it up in England. I wish I’d thought of it and if it’s done properly it’s likely to do far more for Muslim understanding than any number of well-meaning homilies from the Home Office.
4 October, L’Espiessac, France. Staying at the house for a couple of days is Scott Harrison, a young man who once worked as a barman for Lynn Wagenknecht but is now a photographer, working on a hospital ship which plies up and down the coast of West Africa where it berths at various ports and treats the local population, particularly those suffering from non-malignant tumours. The ship’s movements are known and thousands travel to meet it and to be seen and with luck operated on by the ship’s team of surgeons. Many are hideously deformed and outcasts from their tribe or local community on that account. Though the tumours are not in themselves life-threatening their sheer bulk will sometimes throttle or overcome their hosts. The operations, however, are often relatively straightforward, huge protuberances cut away, which instantly restore a hideously distorted face to relative normality, with those operated on requiring only minimal after-care. To the sufferers (and to those who have cast them out) the transformation seems miraculous and thousands of the afflicted await the ship’s coming in the hope of treatment.
Scott has taken pictures of all this, some of which he has recently shown in New York and which tonight we (slightly reluctantly it has to be said) sit on the sofa in this French farmhouse and look at. They are, of course, heartrending, particularly painful the stricken, shamefaced aspect of the afflicted, who think themselves cursed: else why is one eye stuck out on a balloon of flesh twelve inches from its fellow; what is this huge creature growing out of the side of their neck; why can they no longer speak? The delight when they are relieved of these monstrous burdens is wonderful to see, particularly when they go home to show themselves to their families. All this Scott has photographed and plainly thinks of nothing else: he is entirely single-minded, obsessive even, nothing else interests him or engages him and though he’s handsome enough he seems almost monkishly set apart. Maybe, too, he now wants to be a doctor. Several times when commenting on his photographs he says of some dreadful-seeming tumour that it was easily cured. ‘It’s a simple operation. I could do it.’
On another level entirely these photographs are interesting as many of the facial disfigurements recall the paintings of Francis Bacon, who is said to have been fascinated by medical textbooks and the pictures of such tumours that he found in his father’s library when a child. This has never seemed to me to detract from his art: it explains some of it at best but doesn’t, as it were, explain it away. Some of the photographs of these African patients, though, are so strangely reminiscent of Bacon’s paintings that his pictures seem almost a documentary record of what can happen to the human face and this does seem if not to diminish his paintings, at least to demystify them and make them more comprehensible. So that one almost thinks like Scott, though of the painting: ‘It’s a simple operation. I could do it.’
Though the quality of the artwork is different these thoughts about Bacon apply also to Jack Vettriano, the Scottish painter (what once would have been called a commercial artist) who this week has been shown to have composed his paintings from figures taken directly from a manual of figure painting. This is no different from what Bacon did, though his paintings are shot through with disgust and despair as Vettriano’s are with cheap romance.
2 October. Some drunken lads in the buffet bar as we are queuing to get off the train at King’s Cross, one of whom was trying to explain to the others who I was.
‘Really? He’s tall for a playwright.’
Difficult to tell whether this was wit or drink, but quite funny nevertheless.
17 October. No newspaper that I’ve seen discusses the police in institutional terms or sees them as subject to the same compulsions as govern other large corporate organisations. The need to grow, for instance, and accumulate new powers and spheres of influence comes as much from within the organisation as from any demands that are being made on it. Ninety days’ detention suits the police not so much because thereby more evidence is forthcoming and with it an increased likelihood of convictions but because it will result in them having more power: more staff, more premises, more funds. This has nothing to do with justice, civil liberty or the preservation of order and the prevention of terrorism. It is the law of institutions. Like Tesco the police must grow.
18 October. Robert Hanks, the radio critic of the Independent, remarks that personally he can have too much of Alan Bennett. I wonder how he thinks I feel.
22 October. Mention in a piece by Caryl Phillips in today’s Guardian of a school in Leeds. ‘When I was a boy, we used to play football against a secondary school with the somewhat hopeful name of Leeds Modern. The joke, of course, was there was precious little that was modern about Leeds, including that school. This is palpably not the case now.’ That was my school, the old boys of which were called Old Modernians, and I’ve always thought that this was a pretty fair description of that blend of backward-looking radicalism and conservative socialism which does duty for my political views. I am an old modernian.
25 October. Today is the first time I have been into Romany’s the builder’s merchants formerly in Camden High Street, which now inhabits a converted tram shed in Arlington Street. Visiting Romany’s used to be a humiliating experience as the (mainly white) staff always managed to imply that one’s ignorance of the gauge of screw you wanted reflected on your manhood. No longer. Now the staff is largely Asian and one’s incompetence becomes a reason for sympathy and also high-pitched amusement. Where previously there was an ill-concealed impatience now there is compassion, sympathy and even giggling. I never thought buying a tarpaulin, which I did today, could be such a pleasure.
26 October. An interesting letter this morning from Claire Tomalin about th