House arrest, p.3
House Arrest,
p.3
15 December There were those in 1914 who believed that war was just what was needed – as a cleanser and a salutary shock. England would be the better for it. As we wait for the result of the final Brexit talks, the heirs of these fools are still with us.
24 December In the late afternoon we watch Carols from King’s, which isn’t the customary Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. It may be that the BBC, or even King’s, has got nervous about overdoing religion. The service has a dramatic shape, beginning with Isaiah and ending with the Nativity and St John. Now, or today anyway, no nine lessons but an anthology of devotional stuff, well meant but telling no tale. Christmas is a time for repetition – the repetition part of the ritual. The congregation isn’t bored with Christmas, only the programme-makers.
31 December My year ends when Rupert takes me up to one of the health centres in Camden, which has been kitted out as a vaccination centre. Though neither of us knows quite where it is, we realise we must be getting close from the number of eighty-year-olds and carers making their way off the Kentish Town Road, all on the same errand. Unfortunate that both the disease and the remedy begin with a v. At eighty-six (I excuse myself), I get them mixed up so at the head of the queue for the vaccine I say it’s for the virus, both of them v words. Rupert isn’t allowed in, and I go fairly briskly through a series of waiting rooms before reaching the vaccination room. It’s busy but quiet, and notable, considering the presence of so many aged patients, for the absence of chuntering. Everyone, not surprisingly, seems in good humour. My only complaint is that since I’m isolating with my partner, it would seem sensible to vaccinate him too. But then not all the staff at the centre have been vaccinated either.
18 January 2021 I have worn pretty much the same outfit since this business began, only varying it as the weather’s got colder to put on a thicker pullover. This has something to do with not yielding to circumstance, and reminds me of fellow conscripts on the Russian Course during my National Service in 1953. It was a very relaxed unit, and we did not have to wear uniform except on ceremonial occasions and were issued with official civilian clothes, though one could wear one’s own choice of outfit. One colleague refused this better option and insisted on wearing the army-issue kit, reasoning that to wear one’s own clothes was to give the military something – the wear and tear on the clothes – to which it was not entitled. The army civvies were ill-fitting, itchy and unbecoming, and came from a depot at Woking – ‘A Woking suit, no smoking suit’ was one of the cabaret turns we did at the time.
4 February Slightly wish I’d lightened my grumblings about arthritis with a reminiscence of my great-uncle Norris, included in an earlier memoir but no worse for that. Uncle Norris was, I think, Grandpa Peel’s brother and was a wine and spirit merchant by profession. He ended his days in Stafford House, an old people’s home in Halifax, but very cheerfully, as he was convinced (and never missed an opportunity of telling you) that he was about to become a millionaire. Why? Because he, Norris Peel, had discovered the cure for arthritis, and once this was made known, an arthritis foundation in America would make over to him their entire funding. The cure consisted in cutting off the feet of one’s socks and wearing them as anklets. This is what Uncle Norris had done and he had never had arthritis, so it must be a cure. He had written to many of the notables of the day to tell them the good news – a mixed bag: Winston Churchill, Semprini, Wilfred Pickles, Val Doonican – and he would show you a sheaf of their acknowledgments, which included several outlying royals. ‘He’s batchy,’ Dad would say, meaning ‘he’s barmy’, but it certainly kept him happy.
27 February The hair is getting to be a problem. As children, my brother and I had our hair cut at Mr Shaw’s, the barber on Armley Moor Top in Leeds. It was a wearisome business after school when the shop was always full. Mr Shaw, who was bald, never condescended to talk to us children, who in any case were rapt in Everybody’s and Picture Post and even the occasional Lilliput. When we lived in Headingley it was Mr Oddy on Shire Oak Street, another bald and taciturn fellow, but with classier magazines, in particular Britannia and Eve, notable for illustration of bare-breasted ladies driving chariots in the genteel porn that was the speciality of F. Matania. My dad had his hair cut on the same parade as his butcher’s shop in Meanwood, though never to the satisfaction of my mother, who claimed he came home ‘looking like a scraped cock’. She meant a plucked fowl, and had no thought of being misunderstood.
Today’s barber is my partner, who, while professing to admire my abundant locks, manages to make me look like a blond Hitler. He was also wondering if he could have the offcuts, in case they might find a market on eBay.
11 March It should not be forgotten that, with his customary foresight and good judgement, one of the first acts of the current prime minister was to hasten to the side of President Trump, whom he then shipped across the Atlantic to meet H.M. The Queen. And that it was the now much-abused Speaker, John Bercow, who ruled out any thought of Trump addressing a joint session of parliament. His reward was to be refused the customary peerage on retirement by this prime minister, who happily doled out peerages to umpteen millionaires, all of them donors to the Tory Party. And so we go on.
The Journey Home
Now in the autumn of 2021 we have resumed our pre-lockdown routine, going home by train from King’s Cross to Leeds with a wheelchair at both ends. It’s an exemplary service, friendly, cheerful and sometimes hair-raising, they push you at such a rate. Today unaccountably there is a life-size dinosaur in the booking hall at Leeds, thrashing its tail and emitting great belches of prehistoric dyspepsia. Lunch follows just outside the station at Sous Le Nez, a cosy brasserie on Quebec Street where we have been coming now for ten years, and which happily has survived its enforced closure. Table 25. Fish and chips invariably. In and out in 45 minutes, after which we drive north and home.
It’s always said of Leeds that it’s easy to get out of, not much of a compliment though it’s true, and I’ve been doing it half my life. In my TV play Sunset Across the Bay (1975), a couple retiring from Leeds to Morecombe wave the city goodbye saying, ‘Bye bye, mucky Leeds.’ True in 1975, it wouldn’t be true today when, though too much has been demolished, at least it’s clean with green fields on the horizon where once were back-to-backs.
These days it’s Rupert who does the driving and like Guermantes and Combray (though not) there’s a choice of routes, with Burley Road above Kirkstall the current favourite. On the left across the valley is the spire of St Bartholomew’s where my parents were married, and further along the tower of Christ Church where I went to what was then called ‘little school’. But now we must turn off up St Anne’s Lane, a slightly awkward thoroughfare which only just takes the passage of two cars. Today someone (possibly having had a scrape) has fixed a neat cyclostyled notice to a lamp post: ‘Stupid thin road.’ It’s the choice of ‘thin’ rather than ‘narrow’ that makes it droll.
We now cross Headingley Lane, heavily parked if the Rhinos are playing a match, and go up Queenswood Drive past a parade of shops that includes the salon Scissor’s Palace. There’s also a second-hand furniture shop which, lacking the onomastic ingenuity peculiar to hairdressers, is called ‘Take Another Look’, but which often has its stock outside on display. We have a fantasy that one day we will see a William Kent chair or something by Chippendale but in all the years we’ve been coming by we’ve never stopped to find out.
On we go, turning right into Spen Lane past the house once lived in by Mr Fletcher, the music master at my school who was an early fan of Sibelius and was once invited to Finland to meet him, only the Council wouldn’t give him time off. Then down West Park Drive where somewhere lived Tolkien, the house nowadays not perhaps quite the place of pilgrimage it once was. This brings us to Otley Road and past the site of my school, Leeds Modern, and a casualty of Leeds’s passion for demolition, its replacement not unlike a small provincial airport. This is the ring road with beyond it the genteel suburb of Lawnswood, with its crematorium where I used to work as a student (though only as a gardener not a stoker). Beyond Lawnswood in theory … and until recently in fact … is the green belt, now sadly nibbled away so that from Lawnswood to Bramhope is virtually built over. Bramhope is the home of the Brownlee brothers, the Olympic medallists (with a pub named after them) and once (and maybe still) Saddam Hussein’s sister (with no pub). It’s here, though, just round the corner, that one gets the first hint of Wharfedale and the beginning of the dales.
In the old days, this journey was much more stop and go than it is today, as it was enlivened by a succession of junk and antique shops. There was never much in Otley, though that did have a pub named after me, if only for a month. Ilkley had two or three good shops where one could get the odd bargain but now long gone. It was in Ilkley in 1984 that we filmed A Private Function, and the butcher’s shop in Ben Rhydding where, in the film, the butcher (Don Estelle) was had up for selling horse meat is still a butcher’s today, though presumably with superior produce.
In season the a65 is a busy road, some of the traffic headed to Burnsall and Upper Wharfedale, the rest of it en route for the Lake District. Out of season or in the evening we sometimes turn off to Bolton Abbey. Another location for A Private Function. Empty in winter, on a summer evening one may catch a heron fishing by the stepping stones. Then on to Draughton where much more recently there would be a vase of flowers always fresh, marking the place of an accident and which Mike Harding made into a poem and was my inspiration for the monologue The Shrine in last year’s Talking Heads. Round Skipton and through Gargrave (with two antique shops still), and at Coniston Cold we cross John Carr’s bridge over the infant River Aire, coming down from Malham still as bright and fresh as it is in The Water Babies. The first sight of Ingleborough is always memorable though, in the fifty years I’ve lived here, the only time I’ve climbed it was as a soldier on Coronation leave in 1953. If it’s dark and with no street lights, the first thing one notices getting home are the stars and how high the beck. My parents first came here from Leeds in 1966 and were very happy and are still remembered. ‘I don’t care how celebrated you are,’ the coalman said. ‘You’ll never be a patch on your dad.’
by the same author
plays one
(Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, Enjoy)
plays two
(Kafka’s Dick, The Insurance Man, The Old Country, An Englishman Abroad, A Question of Attribution)
the lady in the van
office suite
the madness of george iii
the wind in the willows
the history boys
the habit of art
people
hymn and cocktail sticks
allelujah!
television plays
me, i’m afraid of virginia woolf
(A Day Out, Sunset Across the Bay, A Visit from Miss Prothero, Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Green Forms, The Old Crowd, Afternoon Off)
rolling home
(One Fine Day, All Day on the Sands, Our Winnie, Rolling Home, Marks, Say Something Happened, Intensive Care)
talking heads
two besides
screenplays
a private function
(The Old Crowd, A Private Function, Prick Up Your Ears, 102 Boulevard Haussmann, The Madness of King George)
the history boys: the film
autobiography
the lady in the van
writing home
untold stories
a life like other people’s
fiction
three stories
(The Laying on of Hands, The Clothes They Stood Up In, Father! Father! Burning Bright)
the uncommon reader
smut: two unseemly stories
six poets, hardy to larkin, an anthology
Copyright
First published in 2022
by Faber and Faber Limited
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
and
Profile Books Ltd
29 Cloth Fair
London EC1A 7JQ
Typeset by Agnesi Text, Hadleigh, Suffolk Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
All rights reserved
© Forelake Ltd, 2022
Illustration of Alan Bennett’s desk © Jon McNaught
A selection of these diary entries was first published in the London Review of Books (7 January 2021) and then in House Arrest: Diary Selections from a Pandemic Year (LRB Limited Editions, 2021)
The right of Alan Bennett to be identified as authorof this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978–1–800–81192–8
eisbn 978–1–800–81193–5
Alan Bennett, House Arrest
