Untold Stories
A year or so earlier when Miss Shepherd had been ill I’d tried to get some help from what remained of the convent at the top of the street. I got nowhere but the visit confirmed me in my low opinion of nuns, or this particular order anyway. Another cut:
A. BENNETT 2: Nuns, it seems to me, took the wrong turning at the same point as British Rail. Around the time that porters were forced to forsake their black serge waistcoats, monkey jackets and oilcloth caps, so some monastic Dr Beeching decreed that nuns lose their billowing wimpled innocence and come on like prison wardresses in grey Tricel twinsets.
WOMAN: Yes?
A. BENNETT: I live down the street.
WOMAN: You do. I’ve seen you. It’s you that has the van.
A. BENNETT: Yes.
WOMAN: Difficult woman.
A. BENNETT: A Catholic.
WOMAN: One of the sisters remembers her. You’re not Catholic?
A. BENNETT: No.
WOMAN: A novice. It may have been twice. Had two stabs at it. It takes a special type.
A. BENNETT 2: Cold brown lino on the floor, dimpled from being so often polished. Room spotless and uncomforting, the only ornament a crucifix.
WOMAN: It’s not an ornament at all.
A. BENNETT: I’ve been told she was very argumentative.
WOMAN: Disputatious she was. I’ve had her pointed out to me on that account. Chalking on the pavement and so on.
A. BENNETT: That’s all in the past. Did she play the piano?
WOMAN: She did not. This is a house of God. There is no piano here. Anyway what is it you want?
A. BENNETT: She’s ill.
WOMAN: Who? The woman?
A. BENNETT: I wondered if there was a nun available who could talk to her, do her some shopping.
WOMAN: We don’t have shopping nuns. It’s a strict order.
A. BENNETT: I’ve seen them shopping. I saw one yesterday in Marks and Spencer. She was buying meringues.
WOMAN: The Bishop may have been coming.
A. BENNETT: Does he like meringues?
WOMAN: What business is it of yours what the Monsignor likes? Who are you, coming round asking if the Bishop likes meringues? Are you a Communist?
A. BENNETT: I just thought there must be nuns with time on their hands.
WOMAN: They don’t have time on their hands. That’s what prayer is for.
A. BENNETT: But she’s ill. She’s a Catholic. I think she may be dying.
WOMAN: They can pray for her, only you’ll have to fill in a form. She’ll probably pull her socks up once your back is turned. That’s been my experience where invalids are concerned.
I make no apology for the fact that Miss Shepherd makes great play with place names: St Albans, Bodmin, Hounslow, Staines. Since the oddity of place names is a staple of English comedy I might be accused of introducing Dunstable, say, for an easy laugh. I was once taken to task by a critic for using Burgess Hill in a play, a name devoid of comic overtones for me but thought by the critic to be a sure indicator of my triviality of mind. I’d actually just been hard put to think of a place and asked the actor who had the line (it was Valentine Dyall) where he lived, hence Burgess Hill. But with Miss Shepherd the extended landscape of places she had known was very real to this now largely stationary wanderer and they were still vivid in her mind as the objects of journeys she was always planning (and sometimes threatening) to make.
When our paths first crossed in the late sixties there was much less dereliction on the streets of London than there is today. Camden Town had its resident company of tramps and eccentrics, it’s true, by no means all of them homeless or beggars, but they were as an aristocracy compared with the dozens of young poor and homeless that nowadays sleep in its doorways and beg on its streets. Several of these ancient archetypal figures were long-time residents of Arlington House, among the last of the Rowton Houses that provided cheap accommodation for working men in London, the one in Camden Town still happily functioning today. Nowadays, though, the windows of its individual cubicles look across to spacious executive apartments and over the restaurants, clubs and all the tawdry chaos of Camden Lock, which to my mind is far more offensive and destructive of the area than the beggars have ever been.
Another speech cut from the play:
There is a community in dereliction even though it may not amount to much more than passing round a bottle. This seems especially apparent in Camden Town, where the doorway of the periodically defunct Odeon or the steps of the drop-in centre opposite are home to a band of social dysfuncts notable for their indiscriminate conviviality and sudden antipathies. Itinerant in that they periodically move on, or are made to do so, they do not go far, the premises of any enterprise that shows signs of faltering (‘Shocking Discounts’, ‘Everything Must Go’) likely to be immediately roosted by this crew of slurred and contentious intoxicates.
Miss Shepherd, though, never thought of herself as a tramp. As a potential prime minister, how could she?
A. BENNETT 2: Our neighbourhood is peopled by several commanding widows and wives: there is Lady Pritchett, the wife of Sir Victor; there is Mrs Vaughan Williams, the widow of the composer; and occasionally to be seen is Elizabeth Jane Howard, the novelist and sometime wife of Kingsley Amis. All tall, grand roost-ruling women possessed of great self-confidence and assured of their position in the world. It is of this substantial sisterhood that Miss Shepherd sees herself as a natural member.
After Miss Shepherd died in April 1989 I had no immediate plans to write about her or any idea of the kind of thing I wanted to write, but it was coming up to the tenth anniversary of the London Review of Books and I had promised Mary-Kay Wilmers that I would contribute something. So I put together an account of Miss Shepherd, using some of the material from my diaries and quoting from the pamphlets of hers that I had saved or rescued from the van. After this account had been published I had one or two stabs at turning it into a play but without success. Miss Shepherd’s story was not difficult to tell; it was my own story over the same period that defeated me. Not that there was a great deal to be said, but somehow the two stories had to interconnect. It was only when I had the notion of splitting myself into two that the problem seemed to solve itself.
Still, very little of my own life is revealed, too little for one of the Alan Bennetts who, having brought the play to a conclusion, breaks back to speak directly to the audience (a function he’s previously left to his partner):
Look. This has been one path through my life … me and Miss Shepherd. Just one track. I wrote things; people used to come and stay the night, and of both sexes. What I mean to say is, it’s not as if it’s the whole picture. Lots of other stuff happened. No end of things.
The device of having two actors playing me isn’t just a bit of theatrical showing off and does, however crudely, correspond to the reality. There was one bit of me (often irritated and resentful) that had to deal with this unwelcome guest camped literally on my doorstep, but there was another bit of me that was amused by how cross this eccentric lodger made me and that took pleasure in Miss Shepherd’s absurdities and her outrageous demands.
There is no satisfactory way of dubbing these two parts (I would not call them halves) of my personality, and even if ‘the writer’ would do for one, what is the other? The person? The householder? Or (a phrase from the courts) ‘the responsible adult’? As I wrote them first they were like an old married couple, complaining and finding fault with one another, nothing one thought or said a surprise to the other. I then started to find more fun in their relationship, made it teasing and even flirtatious, a line that the actors Nicholas Farrell and Kevin McNally made more of in rehearsal.
Alan Bennett the author then became definitely more mischievous, more amoral, than the Alan Bennett who goes out dutifully in his Marigold gloves in order to scoop his unsavoury lodger’s poop, so that in some sense the division between them illustrates Kafka’s remark that to write is to do the devil’s work. Of course Kafka doesn’t imply the
converse, that scooping the poop (or fetching Miss Shepherd her sherbet lemons) is God’s work. I never felt it so and resented neighbours or well-wishers who cast me in the saintly role, preferring to be thought of as a fool. Still, there was no way of ducking these attributions of goodness, as the more I rebutted them the more selfless I seemed. ‘Kind is so tame,’ says Kevin McNally in the play, and that at least comes from the heart.
In one particular instance, I wish the part of me Kevin McNally plays had in life been more venturesome. The cheap commercialisation of Camden High Street was just getting into its stride in 1989 when Miss Shepherd died but it was already far enough advanced for fliers about new boutiques and cafés to be put regularly through my door. At that time I let slip several opportunities that someone of a more mischievous temper than mine might well have taken up. Being on the electoral roll, Miss Shepherd was sent as many circulars as I was, including several from restaurants offering a free dinner (generally candlelit) to potential customers. I didn’t avail myself of any of these offers but I regret now that I didn’t pass on her vouchers to Miss Shepherd, as I would quite like to have seen the scene in such a restaurant with Miss Shepherd scowling and slurping (and smelling), surrounded by the appalled residents of Primrose Hill.
We were fortunate with the play to have a long rehearsal period (five and a half weeks) plus two weeks of previews, a time in which the anticipated difficulties of getting the van onto the stage and hoisting it off could be dealt with. In the event there were few problems with the van or the Robin Reliant, which also does a tour of the stage. What took up the time was the text, in particular the presentation of the two selves. Should they be dressed alike, for instance, in sports coat, M&S corduroys, suede shoes, the clothes I like to think I just happened to be wearing when the designer, Mark Thompson, paid me a visit, but near enough, I suppose, to what I wear every day? But are these the proper garments of my inner voice? Should the other self be put into something more sophisticated and metropolitan, black trousers, perhaps, a black polo neck?
In the end we decided that would be simplistic and so the two selves were dressed alike, and though this means that some of the audience are a bit slow to understand what is going on, it is probably better and sillier (which I like) to make them Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They were luckier than Maggie Smith, who as Miss Shepherd had to deck herself out in a variety of outfits, many of them quick changes, which had to be achieved in the cramped interior of the van.
Over the years Miss Shepherd had four or five vans, of which in the stage production we see two: the one (donated by Lady Wiggin) which she drives onto the stage halfway through the first act, and another, supposedly the same, on which the curtain rises for Act Two, but since this is several years later now transformed by Miss Shepherd’s usual coat of scrambled egg or badly made custard. Miss Shepherd’s fascination with any aid to locomotion meant that she over-supplied herself not only with vans but even with walking sticks, of which she had many, one of which Maggie Smith uses in the play. It still bears traces of Miss Shepherd’s characteristic yellow paint, evidence of her last painting job done on the three-wheeler which she parked outside my gate, where (another relic) the kerb still shows a few tell-tale yellow spots.
The three-wheeler had a predecessor, a battered Mini, but this was stolen only a month or two after Miss Shepherd acquired it and was later found abandoned in the basement of the council flats in Maiden Lane near King’s Cross. Like the Reliant, its chief function had been as a supplementary wardrobe and it was thus heavily pervaded by Miss Shepherd’s characteristic odour. I felt slightly sorry for the thieves (who were never, of course, caught), imagining them making off with the vehicle and only as they sped illicitly through Camden Town being hit by the awfulness of what it contained, this realisation signalled by expressions of vernacular fastidiousness such as ‘Do me a favour!’, ‘Cor, strike a light!’ or, as the scent took hold, ‘Jesus wept!’ So that when, having gone to Maiden Lane to recover some of her papers from the car, I found it bearing a Police Aware notice, I felt that it had, in this case, a heightened significance.
I have always spelled her name Shepherd but I think the correct spelling, if an assumed name can have a correct spelling, was Sheppard, the difference, I suppose, distinguishing between the character whom I knew and the one I have written about. At one early stage, out of a courtesy which was probably even then old-fashioned, I called her Mrs Shepherd, a designation which she did not immediately correct. Nowadays, of course, such delicacy seems misplaced, and also fanciful, because if she was Mrs Shepherd there must have been a Mr Shepherd and he would be very hard to imagine.
Miss Shepherd was solipsistic to a degree, and in her persistent refusal to take into account the concerns or feelings of anyone else except herself and her inability to see the world and what happened in it except as it affected her, she behaved more like a man than a woman. I took this undeviating selfishness to have something to do with staying alive. Gratitude, humility, forgiveness or fellow feelings were foreign to her nature or had become so over the years, but had she been otherwise she might not have survived as long as she did. She hated noise, though she made plenty, particularly when sitting in her three-wheeler on a Sunday morning revving the engine to recharge the battery. She hated children. Reluctant to have the police called when the van’s window had been broken and herself hurt, she would want the law summoning if there were children playing in the street and making what she considered too much noise or indeed any noise at all.
She inhabited a different world from ordinary humanity, a world in which the Virgin Mary could be encountered outside the post office in Parkway and Mr Khrushchev higher up the street; a world in which her advice was welcomed by world leaders and the College of Cardinals took note of her opinion. Seeing herself as the centre of this world, she had great faith in the power of the individual voice, even though it could only be heard through pamphlets photocopied at Prontaprint or read on the pavement outside Williams and Glyns Bank.
Though I never questioned Miss Shepherd on the subject, what intrigued me about the regular appearances put in by the Virgin Mary was that she seldom turned up in her traditional habiliments; no sky-blue veil for her, still less a halo. Before leaving heaven for earth the BVM always seemed to go through the dressing-up box so that she could come down as Queen Victoria, say, or dressed in what sounded very much like a sari. And not only her. One of my father’s posthumous appearances was as a Victorian statesman, and an old tramp, grey-haired and not undistinguished, was confidently identified as St Joseph (though minus his donkey), just as I was taken briefly for St John.
With their fancy dress and a good deal of gliding about, it was hard not to find Miss Shepherd’s visions comic, but they were evidence of a faith that manifestly sustained her and a component of her daily and difficult life. In one of her pamphlets she mentions the poet Francis Thompson, who was as Catholic as she was (and who lived in similar squalor). Her vision of the intermingling of this world and the next was not unlike his:
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry: – and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry, – clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!
It’s now ten years since Miss Shepherd died, but hearing a van door slide shut will still take me back to the time when she was in the garden. For Marcel, the narrator in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the sound that took him back was that of the gate of his aunt’s idyllic garden; with me it’s the door of a broken-down Commer van. The discrepancy is depressing but then most writers discover quite early on that they’re not going to be Proust. Besides, I couldn’t have heard my own garden gate because in order to deaden the (to her) irritating noise Miss Shepherd had insisted on me putt
ing a piece of chewing gum on the latch.
The National Theatre
The first time I ever set foot on the stage at the National was in November 1987 at the Cottesloe. It was an inauspicious debut. Patrick Garland had put together an evening of Philip Larkin’s poetry and prose entitled Down Cemetery Road, done as a two-hander with Alan Bates as Larkin. This was then revived at short notice for some extra performances but Alan wasn’t available and I agreed to substitute. The change of cast had-n’t been advertised and many of the audience, having come along expecting to see Alan Bates, must just have thought he’d gone downhill a bit since they last saw him wrestling naked on a rug with Oliver Reed.
I was also in the middle of some extensive dentistry, which involved the removal of several bridges and, though the dentist had assured me that the effects of the anaesthetic would have worn off long before the evening’s performance, I often took the stage feeling as if large sections of my mouth were coned off. The anaesthetic did indeed wear off during the course of the performance so that when I hit a suddenly tender spot there was the occasional agonised yelp uncatered for in Larkin’s muted verse. Even at the best of times the poet didn’t care for the public performance of his works so it was perhaps fortunate he had died two years previously.
What the audience felt I tried not to think though I remember coming off at the interval and en route for my dressing-room meeting Judi Dench and her attendants bound for the Olivier stage. ‘Not many laughs tonight,’ I said. ‘None at all with us,’ she replied, but since she was appearing in Antony and Cleopatra this was hardly surprising. They had one unscheduled laugh one night, though, as it was while she was giving her Cleopatra that Judi was made a dame. On the evening in question Michael Bryant, playing Enobarbus, turned upstage and muttered en passant, ‘Well, I suppose a fuck’s quite out of the question now’, an extra-textual remark, such is Michael’s never other than immaculate diction, that was heard by the first ten rows.