Writing Home (33 page)

All this is because in a profile in
The New Yorker
a week or so ago I made a few unguarded remarks about my personal life. These are apparently reprinted and amplified in this morning’s
Mail
, as if I had approached the paper anxious to come clean.

‘Hello?’ The balding young man is calling through the letter-box. ‘Hello, Mr Bennett. Can I have a chat? I just want to clear up one or two misconceptions.’

Periodically the chairman of the parish council pokes his little lens through the car window and takes yet another photograph of the mute house.

Around four the shifts change and Ms Hardface and the chairman of the PCC go off, leaving a bearded young man to do duty for them both.

‘I don’t want to make your life a misery,’ says one of the notes put through the door.

I think of George Steiner, who asked Lukacs how he got through so much work. ‘House arrest, Steiner. House arrest.’

16 September
. A. N. Wilson thoughtfully weighs in, this time in the
Evening Standard
, comparing me with Liberace and Cliff Richard and saying I have been boasting about my sex life. ‘You silly prat’ is what I feel, wondering how anyone who writes for such a rag as the
Standard
feels in a position to say anything about anybody. The littleness of England is another thought. All
you need to do if you want the nation’s press camped on your doorstep is say you once had a wank in 1947.

26 September
. Six days in France, much of it in drenching rain, driving round Provence. Most towns and villages now meticulously restored – Lacoste, Les Baux, Aries, Uzés, the cobbles relaid, the stone cleaned and patched, everywhere scrubbed and made ready – for what? Well, for art mainly. For little shops selling cheap jewellery or baskets, for galleries with Provençal pottery and fabrics, bowls and beads and ‘throws’. Better, having done the clean-up, to put a machine-shop in one of these caves, a butcher’s where a butcher’s was, a dry-cleaner’s even. But no, it’s always art, dolls, kitchenware, tea-towels. And people
throng
(myself included), Les Baux like Blackpool.

Aries is better because a working place still, and with a good museum of monumental masonry – early Christian altarpieces, Roman gravestones – and beneath it a labyrinth of arcaded passages that ran under the old Roman forum. The Musée Arlaten, on the other hand, is rather creepy, the walls crowded with primitive paintings of grim females – Arlésiennes presumably – and roomfuls of nineteenth-century folkish artefacts, collected under the aegis of the trilby-hatted poet Frédéric Mistral, whose heavily moustached image is everywhere. Many of the rooms contain costumed dummies which are only fractionally less lively than the identically costumed attendants, some of them startlingly like Anthony Perkins’s mother in
Psycho
.

Then to an antique fair in the middle of some
zone industrielle
, every stall stocked with the appurtenances of French bourgeois life: great bullying wardrobes, huge ponderous mirrors and cabinets of flowery china. For the first time in my life I find myself longing for a breath of stripped pine.

12 October
,
Baltimore
. Edward Kemp, the National Theatre’s staff director, goes into a diner. ‘How do you like coffee?’ asks the waitress, who is black.

‘White, please,’ said Edward.

‘Excuse me?’

‘White… with milk.’ The explanation notwithstanding the waitress marches away into the kitchen, refusing to serve him.

Another waitress comes out, also black.

‘All I want,’ says the hapless Edward, who has not twigged, ‘is a white coffee.’

‘No,’ says the waitress. ‘You want a brain.’

26 October
. The queue outside the post office this morning trails right up past the (now closed) Parkway Cinema, where half a dozen people are sleeping in the doorway. Sunley, who demolished the St James’s Theatre back in the early sixties, are still at it thirty years and a clutch of knighthoods later. I suppose Mr Major would cite the redevelopment of the cinema as evidence of ‘the recovery’.

8 November
. The Government is preparing to sell off the forests and nature reserves. I wonder whether it ever occurs to the fourteen-year-olds who staff the Adam Smith Institute that such seemingly unrelated policies have something to do with the rise in crime and civil disorder generally. Paid to think the unthinkable, do they not see that unless the State is perceived as benevolent – a provider of amenities, parks, art, transport even – how should it demand respect in its prescriptive and law-giving aspect? Particularly when the law is represented by Group 4.

24 November
. Some junior minister blames the Bulger murder on the Church of England’s failure to teach the difference
between right and wrong. Poor Church. It’s supposed to hold the Government’s coat (and its peace) while the Government kicks the shit out of society, and then it has to take the blame for the damage that’s been done.

28 November
,
Leeds
. Fewer beggars in Leeds than in London, though I notice today a young man approach a woman asking for some change. ‘Oh,
don’t
!’ she wails in a tone so heartfelt it’s as if his necessities are the day’s last straw.

Forty years ago beggars in Leeds had specific locations. Bond Street was patrolled by the smarter prostitutes but also by Cigarette Liz, an old gypsyish woman in half a dozen coats and with a stained tab end always dangling from her lips. Outside Trinity Church on Boar Lane was a man with a flat cap and deformed legs, his hands resting on what as a child I took to be blocks of Sunlight soap which I thought he was selling, but which were the grips on which he hauled himself along. No one seemed to give him anything, perhaps because, like me, they just thought of him as a feature of the street.

Someone I took for a long time to be a tramp wasn’t at all. Dirty, often drunk, in a greasy overcoat and very Jewish, he would hang around the art gallery or slump over a book of paintings in the reference library, where he would be periodically woken up by the staff and told, ‘No sleeping.’ This was the painter Jacob Kramer, an early Vorticist and contemporary of Nevinson, William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis. I had often looked at his portrait of Delius in the art gallery without knowing that, like Proust’s Elstir, this down and out was the painter.

Roberts, who was Kramer’s brother-in-law, was often to be seen in Camden Town in the seventies. An apple-cheeked man, he looked like a small rotund farmer but wasn’t at all amiable and if one got in his way on the pavement he would unleash a torrent
of abuse. Knowing his wife slightly, I was once asked back to tea but made to promise that should Roberts appear I was to show no interest in painting. When he didn’t I was both relieved and disappointed.

29 November
. In one strategem for not working today I find myself carefully cleaning off the accumulation of dried ointment from the nozzle of the Vaseline Derma Care hand-lotion dispenser.

13 January
. Having supper in the National Theatre restaurant are Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. ‘I suppose you like this place,’ says Lindsay. I do, actually, as the food is now very good. I say so, and Lindsay, who judges all restaurants by the standard of the Cosmo in Finchley Road, smiles wearily, pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline.

Gavin L. is
en route
for Tangier to see Paul Bowles. I say that Bowles must be quite old now.

‘Yes,’ says Gavin. ‘Eighty-two.’

‘That’s not so old,’ says Lindsay.

‘Well it’s a funny age, eighty-two,’ says Gavin. ‘I’ve known several people of eighty-two who haven’t made it to eighty-three.’

I don’t think this is meant as a joke.

15 January
. I go into the chemist in Camden High Street and find a down-at-heel young man not quite holding the place to ransom but effectively terrorizing the shop. He keeps pulling items off the shelves, and waving them in the face of the blonde assistant saying, ‘This is mine. And this is mine. The whole
shop’s mine. It’s bought with my money. So don’t you order me out of the shop, you fucking cow. I
allow
you to work here. ‘The mild, rather donnish Asian pharmacist is a bit nonplussed, and as he serves me I offer to go next door to Marks & Spencer’s for their security man. But the blonde assistant is pluckily standing her ground. The young man has a really mean face, and the pharmacist thinks the best thing is to wait until he goes. Which he is about to do when he spots a small woman in her sixties at the other end of the counter, looking at cosmetics.’ And that goes for you too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of eyeliners.

Suddenly the little lady erupts.

‘Right,’ she says, ‘I’m a policewoman,’ and she brandishes her identification in his face as they do in police series. ‘You’re nicked.’

She isn’t exactly an intimidating figure and he’s practically out of the shop now anyway, but it seems to decide him – he darts off into the bustle of the High Street.

‘I wasn’t having any truck with that,’ says the unlikely policewoman, putting away what quite plainly was her bus pass, and gets on with buying some face cream.

The moral I suppose, is that you can get good behaviour off the television as well as bad.

20 January
. At Paddington a throng of bewildered travellers gaze up at the Departures board, where there’s a bland announcement saying that, due to building work at Heathrow, many services have been rescheduled
earlier
than in the timetable – i.e. everybody misses their train. I sit down meaning to have some coffee from my flask, only to find it’s broken (an old-fashioned accident, breaking flasks something I associate with the forties). I wander round the station with the dripping flask looking for a litter bin, but because of the risk of bombs
there are none. I can’t just put the flask discreetly down lest it be mistaken for a bomb itself and the whole station grind to a halt, so it’s ten minutes before I find a railwayman who will take it off me, by which time my train is in.

25 January
. Having spoken at Norwich, I trek across England to Birmingham to speak there, never more conscious of Larkin’s strictures about going round the country pretending to be oneself. It’s a beautiful morning, the flat fields made dramatic and Dutch by floods and huge skies, but the whole journey is ruined by two schoolboys going off for university interviews. They try to impress one another with their knowledge of current affairs and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to.

At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights ‘class, then do another Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience.

26 January
. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (
sic
) has done a diary for the
Spectator
mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by Tristram) as one of the books he was putting in the guest bedroom at Chatsworth. ‘I wish he’d leave a copy in
all
the bedrooms,’ drawls Tristram. ‘Then it would be a best-seller.’

Take the second draft of the filmscript of
The Madness of
George III
to be printed. Nick Hytner has the good idea of fetching the King back from Kew to Westminster to prove to the MPs that he has recovered from his madness. Of course, it never happened, but the nearer one gets to production the bolder one gets. I hope it’s boldness anyway.

23 February
. Derek Jarman has died. I liked his writing more than I did his films, though I wish he had made the film which he once asked me to write about his father, a Battle of Britain pilot who turned kleptomaniac in his old age. Jarman dies on the eve of the fudged Commons vote which reduces the age of male consent to eighteen not sixteen. Anyone in any doubt should have compared the speech by the civilized and courageous Chris Smith with that of the bigot Tony Marlow. ‘Predatory’ is a word much in evidence, the frail faltering flame of heterosexuality always in danger of being snuffed out by the hot homosexual wind.

1 March
. It seems pretty well accepted now that much of one’s life, including the length of it and the weaknesses to which one will be prone, is decided in the womb. This would please Kafka, or at any rate confirm his worst fears: to be sentenced to death before one is even born would be for him a kind of apotheosis.

25 March
,
Yorkshire
. Drive over into Wensleydale for the view of a sale at Tennant’s. Leyburn turns out to be a High Recognition Area, and as I walk past the church two middle-aged WI-type ladies come out and their faces light up. ‘Oh, do come and have a Lenten Lunch. Very simple. Delicious soup. All home-made!’ Actually I wouldn’t have minded the soup but I can’t face the chat, though in the event I can’t settle on anywhere else to eat either. Tennant’s, which was a small country auctioneer’s twenty years ago, with sales in church halls etc., is now a huge concern with a vast custom-built South-Forks-like pavilion complete with restaurant (where again I don’t eat), changing-room for babies, computer terminals and all the paraphernalia of big business. There are some nice bits of furniture, but the atmosphere (well-heeled retired couples, women in sharp little Robin Hood hats, men in Barbours) puts
me off, and, having driven fifty miles to get there, I spend ten minutes looking round then beat a quick retreat.

I drive back over Upper Wharfedale to Kettlewell on a road that used to be deserted and scarcely signposted, though this was probably twenty years ago too. Now it’s obviously a scenic tour for Sunday afternoons and another outing for retired leisure. I stop and look in Hubberholme church, and sitting in a pew see a plaque on a pillar recording that the remains of J. B. Priestley are buried near this spot. I look at the war memorial to the dead of the 1914–18 war (ranks not given) and think of boys going on carts down the dale once the harvest was in. Dennis Potter’s impending death is announced this morning, and I wonder where his ashes will lie. Potter’s health, or lack of it, has always been a factor in his fame, so that, like Kafka, he visibly conformed to what the public thinks artists ought to be – poor or promiscuous, suffering or starved. And perhaps that’s why Priestley was treated so condescendingly: because he was none of these things.