LOVABLE? NO, ALAN BENNETT’S A LIVERISH OLD CLASS WARRIOR
WHEN IT comes to lovability, few can surely compete with playwright Alan Bennett. With his cardigans and that ooh-Betty Leeds accent, he’s such a dear old thing.
But not to me. With his bellyaching against selective and private education — ‘Not fair!’ he declares, stamping his foot — he is an acid class-warrior who wants to abolish private schools.
Bennett was once a new-wave satirist. He was part of the Beyond The Fringe team, which in the Sixties helped to rip down the old order, loosening respect for the Church, the Macmillan Tory party, judges and the military. What juicy targets they were, ripe for the plucking.
Not that it was particularly brave work. Those purple-nosed boobies of the bench and those gowned beaks at minor public schools were already on the way out. A really brave satirist is the one who takes on the incoming regime.
In his play Forty Years On (1968), Bennett attacks the past: Empire, tradition, retiring authority. Among his targets are superannuated majors in South Coast guesthouses who still use their military rank despite having long ago left the Army.
To have made that point in the Forties would have been edgy. To have examined it in the early Fifties might have been interesting from a psychological aspect. But to swipe at them in the late Sixties?
Were those ageing chaps really a threat? Or were they not just sad and lonely figures who in their egg-stained regimental ties and hankering for a daily routine were gamely trying to keep body and soul together?
Poet Laureate John Betjeman covered the nostalgia beat with greater charity. He wrote of sunburnish’d Aldershot beauties and elderly maids contentedly praying in church light scented by lilies.
BENNETT writes of timid working-class mams and aunties worried about their Ps and Qs, furtively gossiping about their neighbours.
Both writers peddle memories. Both may be touched by a rueful melancholy. But Betjeman’s verbal watercolours have a faint wash of solidarity whereas Bennett’s words chronicling genteel, lower-middle-class northern ladies are written as though from higher ground.
Where Betjeman sympathises, Bennett surreptitiously places himself above his subjects, even his own flesh and blood.
In his autobiography, Untold Stories, he describes his parents and their social hesitations.
He extracts laughs from their wonderment that he, their Alan, had started mixing with those posh folk down south. Many writers of comic fiction exploit their families, but with Bennett there is bitterness in the ink. At times, it feels distinctly as if he is laughing at his parents.
Betjeman memorialises with benevolence and, for that reason, is less revered by the Left, which wants to attack the past in its quest for constant change. Butcher’s boy Bennett is no longer working class because he went to a grammar school, an elitist establishment, based on selection, and from there to the University of Oxford, another highly selective establishment.
He became a supporter of the Left, much feted by the Arts Council, the public universities and the big prize-giving bodies. The same Left attacked grammar schools out of spite and brought in the comprehensive schools which dumbed down British education for decades.
Although bog-standard comprehensives at last may have been discredited — getting the Left to accept that has been like getting antibiotic tablets down a Doberman — the same educationalist Levellers are now in the process of imposing social-class requirements on our top universities.
Bennett, meanwhile, wants to smash the private sector — smash it until the last neo-classical, Portland-stone frieze of public-school culture lies in splinters, like the monasteries after Henry VIII. ‘Private education is not fair,’ wheedles Bennett, himself childless. What the hell is fair? Is it fair that some of us are good at maths and others cannot even count their regrets? Is it fair that Jonny Wilkinson was both brilliant at rugby and wonderfully good-looking? Is it fair that bragging Sir Philip Green is a billionaire?
The answer to those questions is ‘quite possibly’ because their achievements may all, in their way, have involved personal graft and self-discipline.
But is it fair your parents lost their first son in infancy, that your sister died of cancer, that your child has autism? Unfortunately all those things have happened to me, and fairness has bugger all to do with it.
What a pointless, plastic, lazy, Lefty, arrogant word this ‘fair’ is, all the worse when uttered in a maudlin, moany accent.
Does Bennett mean ‘wrong’? There is no right or wrong in providence.
What he probably means by unfair is ‘unequal’ or ‘inegalitarian’, but he is too canny to use those expressions because they would expose him as a droning socialist and that would be bad for his image. It might upset his lawn-mowing, Daily Telegraph-reading fans.
If you want to make something less unfair, it would probably mean taking something away from another person, and how ‘fair’ would that be? A mother has saved to send a little girl to, say, a private dance school where she can do ballet to her heart’s content: are they now to be told that this is illegal?
AND what if a father wants to send his youngsters to the school his family has attended for four generations, but is now told the government has nationalised the site and he must instead go to an educational establishment assigned by his local council?
How fair would it be if Eton, perhaps the world’s greatest school, were to be bulldozed in the name of egalitarian ‘fairness’, as demanded by a playwright who made his fortune out of Radio 4 nostalgia but says he is concerned about poor people?
Despite having sent my own children to fee-paying schools, I am not an unalloyed enthusiast for private education. Today’s public schools are appallingly expensive and not as tough as they should be, scholastically and culturally. They have become so internationalist that they have nearly lost the British dimension that was possibly their great attraction.
Yet to demand their abolition simply in the name of social engineering: that is the stance of an acidic and liverish old bastard.