The Lady in the Van

  With me, kindness was never less kindly nor caring so uncaring with exasperation and self-reproach so often the order of the day.

  24 September

  I open the paper this morning to find that the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire has died … or Debo as everybody called her, but not me, as when I first got to know her I felt our acquaintance was too brief for such familiarity and so ended up calling her ‘Ms Debo’, while I was ‘Mr Alan’. The darling of the Spectator and a stalwart of the Countryside Alliance, an organisation promoting issues like farming, rural services and country sports, she was hardly up my street, but when she wrote asking if I would write an introduction for one of her books I could not have been more flattered had it been Virginia Woolf wanting a preface to Mrs Dalloway. Once the request was made, I knew there was no refusing it and I wrote that the only woman with a will of comparable iron to Debo was Miss Shepherd. Thereafter Debo signed all her letters to me ‘D. Shepherd’, liking the notion that there might be a seventh Mitford sister, one living in Chatsworth, the other in a broken-down Commer van.

  6 October

  The first morning of filming for The Lady in the Van and I sit in what was once my study, the room now bare and cold, the walls plain plaster, just as it was when I first saw the house in 1968 though I’ve no memory of being shown it by the estate agent, which is an early shot in the film. Alex Jennings is playing me and looks remarkably like, with no hint of the outrageous blond there sometimes was in Cocktail Sticks when he played me on the stage.

  The cast of The History Boys are in the film for sentimental reasons and because we enjoy working together, even if some have only one line. Today it’s Sam Anderson, now a star of Doctor Who, who does the opening shot as a Jehovah’s Witness:

  ‘Does Jesus Christ dwell in this house?’

  Alex Jennings/AB: ‘No. Try the van.’

  As always on a film I feel a bit lost, the writer not having a proper function and seldom called upon. After weeks of warm sunny weather today is wet and cold and as Maggie Smith goes out for her first shot she says out of the corner of her mouth, ‘Thanks a million.’

  7 October

  Still not settled in and at one point I find myself perched on top of a dustbin behind the front gate until Sam, the nice PA, finds me a proper seat. I was always led to expect that the director and the stars had their names stencilled on the back of their chosen chairs but in forty or so years filming I’ve never actually seen it, the productions not grand enough maybe. I know the cameraman Andrew Dunn as he filmed The Madness of King George and The History Boys and though he’s always preoccupied I’ve never seen him out of temper, so that his benevolence and Nick Hytner’s cheerfulness infect the unit. It was not always so, with the cameraman often moodier and more temperamental than the actors. When I started there was almost invariably a degree of ill feeling between the sound department and the camera, with sound complaining that the shot as set up made their job impossible. (‘Can’t get in there, guv.’) That’s long gone, the only vestige of it being that sound are generally more forthcoming than the camera crew, who are more self-contained and set more store by their expertise.

  Roger Allam and Deborah Findlay play the neighbours opposite, outside whose house Miss Shepherd parks. They aren’t modelled on the actual neighbours (who had triplets). The only properly named neighbour is Ursula Vaughan Williams, the composer’s widow, who is played by Frances de la Tour. Most of the actors have been in stuff of mine before but not Roger Allam, who has been in practically every play Michael Frayn has written. And I can see why as he’s subtle and funny and as good off-screen as on.

  Taking it all in is David Gentleman. At eighty-odd he stands for all of two hours together sketching what’s going on, delighted at having such a subject on his doorstep.

  11 October

  Come away around 4.30, weary rather than exhausted as I’ve contributed very little, my only suggestion being that Alex Jennings, who is eating an egg sandwich, should drop some of the egg down his pullover, as I invariably do. The costume department seize on this as a piece of cinema verité and egg is accordingly smeared down his front. It hardly seems a day’s work.

  Having two Alan Bennetts was a feature of the stage production though there they were played by different actors. Having them both played by Alex Jennings is harder to establish, particularly at the outset, but the notion that one part of myself dealt with this awkward demanding woman while another part of myself watched myself doing so, often noting it down, was very much what it felt like when it was happening. ‘Living,’ as Camus said, ‘slightly the opposite of expressing’.

  There were times, too, when it seemed, grimly affianced as we were, that this was the only thing that was worthy of note, even if Miss Shepherd’s presence was so prolonged and taken for granted that the idea I would ever be able to turn it into a book, still less literature, seemed absurd. Also absurd was the notion that she was literary raw material and that this was why I’d invited her in to start with … Except of course, if one writes … and by the mid 1980s I’d eventually come to the conclusion that this was what I did and that I was indeed ‘a writer’ … then whatever happens is grist to some creative mill, though without any certainty as to its eventual outcome.

  15 October

  Telling the truth crops up quite a bit in the film, what Miss Shepherd did or didn’t do a subject of some disagreement between the two Alan Bennetts. They call not telling the truth ‘lying’, but ‘the imagination’ would be a kinder way of putting it, with Alan Bennett the writer finally winning through to make Miss Shepherd talk of her past (as she never actually did) and even to bring her back from the dead in order to take her bodily up to heaven (also imaginary). These departures from the facts were genuinely hard-won and took some coming to, causing me to reflect, not for the first time, that the biggest handicap for a writer is to have had a decent upbringing. Brought up not to lie or show off, I was temperamentally inclined to do both, particularly as a small child, and though reining me in perhaps improved my character it was no help in my future profession, where lying, or romancing anyway, is the essence of it. Nor did my education help. One of the difficulties I had in writing The Madness of George III was that, having been educated as a historian, I found it hard ever to take leave of the facts. With George III’s first bout of madness the facts needed scarcely any alteration to make them dramatic and only a little tweaking was required but even that I found hard to do.

  Never strong on invention I have kept pretty closely to the facts of Miss Shepherd’s life, the one exception being the character of the ex-policeman Underwood who figures also in the stage play. He is fictional. That Miss Shepherd had an accident in which a motorcyclist crashed fatally into the van was told me by her brother after her death. It was not her fault but leaving the scene of the accident before the police arrived she was technically guilty of a felony and thus open to blackmail. Underwood is played by Jim Broadbent, with whom I last worked in The Insurance Man, a film about Kafka directed by Richard Eyre which we did in Liverpool in 1985, since when Jim has become an international film star much as Pete Postlethwaite did, while seeming no older than he did thirty years back. He’s instantly authentic (it’s the haircut, I decide), both funny and sinister, and it reminds me how working with him and Julie Walters years ago I used to despair because their casual conversation was funnier and livelier than anything I could dream up. Jim has the ability to look utterly ordinary, certainly in the streets of Camden Town, and though there’s no hint of it in the script one would know just from his walk that he’s an ex-policeman.

  16 October

  On one occasion Miss Shepherd claimed to have seen a boa constrictor in Parkway ‘and it looked as if it was heading for the van’. At the time I dismissed serpent-sighting as just another of Miss S.’s not infrequent visions … boa constrictors, Mr Khrushchev and (putting in regular appearances) the Virgin Mary; the dramatis personae of her visions always rich and varied.

  It turne
d out, however, that on this particular occasion Palmer’s, the old-fashioned pet shop in Parkway (‘Talking parrots, monkeys, naturalists’), had been broken into, so a boa constrictor on the loose and gliding up the street wasn’t entirely out of the question though whether it had a meaningful glint in its eye is more debatable.

  This morning we film the sighting of the snake in one of the Gloucester Crescent gardens. And a proper snake it is, too … a real boa constrictor, all of nine foot long and answering to the name of Ayesha, which has made the journey from Chipping Norton together with her slightly smaller friend and companion Clementine, both in the care of their handler.

  I have had unfortunate experiences with animal handlers as indeed has Maggie Smith, who once had to vault over a stampeding porker during the shooting of A Private Function. To be fair, today’s handler seems sensible and (unlike the pig handler) unopinionated and since Ayesha doesn’t have anything taxing to do in the way of acting, confines himself to making her and Clementine comfortable on a bed of hot-water bottles.

  17 October

  We’re not shooting in sequence so only ten days into the schedule we do the ending of the film. As written ten years or so after Miss S. died (she died in 1989) I’d imagined a blue plaque to her being unveiled on the wall of no. 23. Nick has made this wittier by having the camera pull back to show today’s film crew recording the scene watched by various real-life neighbours from the Crescent. This is also their small reward for their being so forbearing about the inevitable inconvenience the film has involved, except, as I wrote to all of them beforehand, though it would involve them being denied their parking rights for six weeks, housing Miss Shepherd had meant I was deprived of my parking rights for fifteen years. In the event, the scene turns out not quite as I’d imagined. There’s a blue plaque on the wall, with a crowd of neighbours including Antony Crolla, who lives in the house, and my (slightly embarrassed) partner Rupert Thomas but then the camera (on a crane) catches me higher up the street as I bike down to the set. I get off my bike and join the crowd as Alex Jennings makes a little speech about Miss S., pulls the cord and the camera dollies back to reveal the rest of the crew. The plaque looks good and genuine, made, I believe out of some rubbery material. I’m hoping it can be left in situ when the film is finished as it may enhance the value of the property thus compensating for the dilapidations consequent on filming and the company getting the house on the cheap.

  I have previous form when it comes to unveiling blue plaques as a few years ago I had to pull the cord on the plaque for the peppery painter William Roberts’s ex-house in St Mark’s Crescent. It’s a street that’s well supplied with such commemorations. Whereas my own street boasts only one, to Dr Jose Rizal, Writer and National Hero of the Philippines, St Mark’s Crescent has at least three, Arthur Hugh Clough, William Roberts and A. J. P. Taylor. There is one to Sylvia Plath where she lived in Chalcot Square but not in Fitzroy Road where she died. The same house, though, has one to Yeats, of whom the late Eric Korn claimed to have heard a passer-by saying, ‘Yes, it’s a tablet to William Butler Yeast’, at which Eric was tempted to add ‘who was responsible for the Easter Rising’.

  22 October

  We are using several vans in varying stages of dilapidation including one smart number in its original trim given to Miss Shepherd some time in the seventies by Lady Wiggin, a Catholic well-wisher from Regent’s Park Terrace. Smart as it was, Miss Shepherd still gave it her usual treatment, coating it in lumpy yellow paint (lumpy because she had somehow mixed it with Madeira cake), which she applied with a washing-up brush. Consequent on these vehicular permutations, for the purposes of filming the contents of one van have to be taken out and installed in its successor. I sit in my chair on the pavement watching this wearisome process at work and marvelling at the dedication and conscientiousness of Katie Money and the props department who have it to do. Miss S.’s belongings consist of mountains of old clothes, carrier bags stuffed with her papers interspersed with the contents of her larder, half-eaten tins of baked beans, packets of stale sliced bread, loose onions (which she ate raw), rotting apples and wilting celery and dressed over all with half-used toilet rolls, dirty dusters and soiled Kleenex that one didn’t like to look at too closely.

  It would be entirely possible to mock up this distasteful agglomeration with some underlying bean bags, plus a top-dressing of eye-catching refuse. The camera wouldn’t know. But the actors would. So all this detritus is repeatedly and meticulously transferred from van to van as if it were the contents of an eighteenth-century salon. I know this devotion to duty has nothing to do with me personally but I’m the one who has set it all in motion and I would like to shake all their hands … the boy who carefully transfers the opened can of congealed tomato soup, Katie who delicately repositions the dog-eared pack of incontinence pads and puts one of them to dry, as Miss Shepherd did, over the portable electric stove top. I am in all their debt. Instead one of them breaks off to see if she can fetch me a cup of tea.

  24 October

  Included in the street picture are various passers-by, ‘Background action’ it’s called, as extras walk up or down the street in the back of a scene being played in the foreground. One knows that these characters are actors because they are got up in the fashions of the period and it’s particularly noticeable if they’re wearing flares or have long hair. The trouble is the street can’t be entirely closed off so also coming by are entirely authentic people who are sometimes quite eccentric too and one isn’t always sure who are actors and who not. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t matter: this morning A. N. Wilson cycles past in his raincoat and beret and he could have been cycling by in 1970.

  27 October

  Late going round to the unit this morning to find them about to film the scene when manure was being delivered to no. 23, whereupon Miss S. came hurrying over to complain about the stench and to ask me to put a notice up to tell passers-by that the smell was from the manure not her.

  Having done one take we are about to go again when it occurs to me that the manure, if fresh, would probably be steaming, as I seem to recall it doing at the time. While this is generally agreed, no one can think of a way of making the (rather straw-orientated) manure we are using steam convincingly. Dry ice won’t do it and kettles of hot water prove too laborious. So in the end we go with it unsteaming, the net result of my intervention being that whereas previously everybody was happy with the shot, now thanks to me it doesn’t seem quite satisfactory.

  28 October

  We film a scene in which AB is interviewed about his work by an American journalist, in the course of which he gives her tea and (though I hadn’t specified this) cake. Props have opted for Battenberg, which is not a confection I’m much drawn to (I’ve never liked almond paste), but my tentative enquiry about the availability of Madeira produces howls of merriment and so we go with the Battenberg. It’s not that I’m unhappy about this but taken with yesterday’s intervention when I brought the production to a halt over the steam from the manure I think I must learn to keep my own counsel.

  2 November

  Miss S.’s funeral, which in life (or in death) was at Our Lady of Hal in Arlington Road but in the film is at St Silas’s at the foot of Haverstock Hill. We also film Miss S. at mass with Maggie Smith at the communion rail. But not just kneeling. After Miss S.’s death I had a letter from Father Cormac Rigby, who was twenty years an announcer on BBC Radio 3 before leaving the Corporation and being ordained a priest in 1985 when he was sent to live at Our Lady of Hal, Miss S.’s local church. He told me how seeing her in the congregation his heart would sink as he had a bad back and Miss S.’s exigent (though not ostentatious) piety required her virtually to prostrate herself when receiving the host, with the priest thus having to follow her right down in order to post the wafer in her mouth. Maggie does this, too, on her knees, four or five times without complaint or assistance. She’s a few months younger than me but I couldn’t kneel like this or if I went down couldn’t get up a
gain. She does both and on camera. Now she goes into the confessional box to unburden herself for the umpteenth time to the long-suffering priest (Dermot Crowley), telling him about the motorcyclist she thinks she killed in an accident years ago. He has heard it all before and has absolved her many times. ‘Absolution, my child, is not like the bus pass. It does not run out.’ Later when the next in the confessional queue (Clive Merrison) enters the box he staggers back on account of the stench she has left behind her. The priest is unsurprised and we hear his tranquil voice, ‘There is air freshener behind the crucifix.’

  It was Father Cormac Rigby who told me, as much, I felt, out of kindness as conviction, that my taking in Miss Shepherd would speed my passage through Purgatory. I am not banking on it.

  6 November

  A wet morning and today we are filming Miss S.’s burial in Kensal Green cemetery. In fact she is buried in an unmarked grave in Camden and Islington cemetery out near the North Circular road but Kensal Green is more photogenic. It’s cold and drizzling with the actors under umbrellas until the moment before ‘Action!’ when the puddles are briskly swept from the path before the actors stroll down. At one point I see Andrew Dunn delicately remove a noticeable leaf from the path of the camera with all the care of a caddy setting up a putt in golf. Despite the rain Maggie remains good-tempered if subdued though the moment the shot is called she is straightaway full of energy and in good voice. We look at the dignified grave of Alfred Waterhouse, the Victorian painter, and she becomes hysterical over a family plot with a long list of those here interred which ends up, ‘Dora is elsewhere’.