How Uncle Norris and his crazy sock invention helped Alan see the funny side of lockdown
House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries Alan Bennett Profile £6.99 ★★★★★
Alan Bennett has been keeping a diary, on and off, since the early 1970s. At the end of each year an edited version is published in the London Review Of Books, so they occupy the borderline between the private and the public: the tales and observations are all personal, but they are written to be read.
This tiny little book – only 49 pages – covers the period from February 2020 to March 2021, when Britain was in lockdown. The pandemic provides a running theme, almost like background music. On March 4, 2020, he notes that the Queen is wearing gloves at an investiture. ‘But not just gloves; these are almost gauntlets. I hope they’re not the thin end of the wedge, lest Her Majesty end up swathed in protective get-up such as is worn at the average crime scene.’
Often he will employ a topical story as a springboard back into the past. In the early days of the pandemic, he recalls two of his next-door neighbours in Leeds in the 1940s, a father and son, dying of TB, ‘or consumption as it was called then’. This left Bennett’s mother perpetually anxious lest either of her two sons caught it. ‘We were never allowed to wear open-necked shirts, for instance, lest the cold “go to your chest”. Sharing a bottle of pop with other boys was another death trap, as was not wearing a vest or drinking unaired water.’
As Covid kicks in, life contracts, and things change. The nationwide tour of one of his plays is cancelled. But it has its benefits, too. When his partner, a magazine editor, is forced to work from home, he finds that ‘life is much easier, as I get regular cups of tea and a lovely hot lunch’.
Meetings with the director Nick Hytner about a revival of his TV plays Talking Heads have to be conducted on either side of the street. The cast (pictured below) and crew donate the lion’s share of their fees to the NHS.
Bennett (pictured, right, in 1966, aged 32) is 85 when these diaries begin, and he is feeling his age. His arthritis means that he is less mobile; his bicycling days are over. ‘Farewell to the bike has to some extent meant farewell to the health that went with it, and my life is increasingly medicated.’
But, happily, his sense of the absurd remains buoyant. In August 2020 he goes for his customary evening walk around the block. ‘What we have not realised is that it’s Thursday and our progress is hindered by a fusillade of clapping and pan-banging from the neighbours out on their balconies in celebration of the NHS.’
He himself is prevented from clapping by having to clutch his walking stick. He worries that this makes it appear as though ‘with me walking in the road, I am acknowledging the applause and even generating it. I try to disavow this by feebly smiling and shaking my head, but this just looks like modesty. It’s an absurd and inexplicable incident.’
He has always been witty about his measure of fame, modest for a performer, but large for a writer. In earlier diaries he wrote of a hotel doorman who told him: ‘Well, you’re a celebrity yourself. Or on the celebrity side anyway.’ In April 2020, he receives a card from a young fan called Tom King who, a year or two before, had Bennett’s face tattooed on to his arm. ‘The tattoo remains popular,’ writes King, ‘though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation during intercourse.’ At this information Bennett notes, wryly: ‘This suggests the intercourse might be less than fervent, my name in itself something of a detumescent.’
On May 15, 2020, he studies his hands. ‘I’ve never been that fond of my hands. Now, much washed as we are told, they scarcely bear looking at: shiny, veinous and as transparent as an anatomical illustration.’
Watching the Queen, eight years his senior, laying her wreath at the Cenotaph, he is impressed by her greater mobility. ‘In the unlikely event of my being asked to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph I’d have to decline, if only because I couldn’t walk the few steps backwards it requires. Not the least of the Queen’s achievements is that she can still do this in her 90s.’
One might have thought that he had already used all his childhood memories in successive plays and diaries, but this particular mine seems inexhaustible. Or is it just that his stories improve with each telling? At one point he introduces his great-uncle Norris, who is new to me, but he confesses that an old story about him was also included in an earlier memoir ‘but no worse for that’.
Uncle Norris ended his days in Stafford House, an old people’s home in Halifax, very cheerful because he was convinced that he would soon be a millionaire, as he had discovered the cure for arthritis. ‘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 acknowledgements, which included several outlying royals.’
It’s those little words and phrases – ‘notables’, ‘a mixed bag’, ‘outlying’ – as well as the placing of Val Doonican as a dainty punchline at the end of the list of ‘notables’ that make Alan Bennett such a pleasing writer, so relaxed, yet at the same time so exact.
Perhaps it is his long experience as a dramatist that lends his prose such perfect timing: he has an instinct for the needs and expectations of an audience. At one point he reminisces about fishing with his father on the River Wharfe near Tadcaster. Any reader expecting the honeyed glow of nostalgia could be in for a surprise. ‘It was a long time ago, nearly 80 years in fact,’ he writes, ‘but the boredom of the experience is as fresh as ever.’
He then recalls joining his family in catching a train from Leeds to Tadcaster with lots of other fishermen on a Sunday morning in 1941. His mother didn’t enjoy herself. ‘She was particularly unhappy, my brother remembers, because with the luggage racks crammed with fishing tackle, maggots drizzled down on the anglers’ indifferent heads.’ Again, it’s that little word ‘drizzled’ that makes this sentence so funny.
And he recognises this particular skill when he finds it in the work of others, however lowly. The last section of the book is given over to a touching account of the journey he has made these past 50 years back to his home in Ingleborough. At St Ann’s Lane in Kirkstall he spots that someone, ‘possibly having had a scrape’, has fixed a notice to the lamppost: ‘Stupid thin road.’ ‘It’s the choice of “thin” rather than “narrow” that makes it droll,’ he notes, appreciatively.
I was surprised and happy to find that, though I am quite a few years younger than Alan Bennett, I share a childhood memory with him. From 1944 to 1945 the Bennett family lived in Guildford, Surrey, which, in the 1960s, was my family’s local town too. In his diary he remembers the Corona cafe on the high street ‘with a revolving drum of coffee beans in the window and an intoxicating aroma’. Reading this sentence brought back that same gorgeous smell, wafting out over passing shoppers, that I inhaled as a child some 20 years later.