Alan Bennett, our greatest living writer – and such an accredited national treasure that the public (when not mistaking him for David Hockney) applaud him in car parks – is feeling every bone-cracking moment of his 90-odd years.
Though not quite at the nappy stage, ‘these days thoughts of death are seldom far away’, and in Enough Said we hear plenty about cancer of the bowel, arthritic ankles, brain scans, urinary infections, a leaking aorta, cramps, falls and regular visits to the chemist. ‘Who is the scrotal itch?’ demands the pharmacist, emerging with a prescription.
Alan Bennett in 2007
Increasing deafness is an issue. ‘I may be home late. I’ve got to get to Paris,’ somebody said to Bennett, though what they’d really said was, ‘I may be home late, I’ll get the carrots.’ A train that was ‘busy, lots of headmasters’ was in fact, ‘busy, lots had masks on’. Fans once circled Bennett, talking to him about Sophie. Which Sophie? ‘Not Sophie at all. They wanted a selfie.’
Bennett’s days are filled with regular check-ups, blood pressure monitoring, colonoscopies and consultations (paid for privately – Bennett, with ‘an embarrassingly large sum in my deposit account’, doesn’t wish to burden the NHS) but the chief characteristic of old age, nevertheless, isn’t illness, it’s the anomaly that ‘one’s ears get larger and one’s d**k gets smaller’. That’s something to conjure with.
Sex, indeed, is often on Bennett’s mind. He looks back and wishes he’d had more erotic confidence. Boxed in by his reserve, ‘my problem was lack of sex rather than what sort’. Matters weren’t taken properly in hand, so to speak, until he met Rupert Thomas in 1992. Thirty years Bennett’s junior, Rupert, formerly the editor of The World Of Interiors, these days is the full-time nurse and home-help, sorting out the pill pots, shopping, cooking, driving, clearing up, doing his utmost to stop Bennett becoming ‘a smelly old man’.
Meanwhile, as one of those ancient chaps who shuffles to a park bench, Bennett sits in the sunshine dreaming about Tom Daley’s ‘lustrous looks’, the ‘gorgeous creatures’ on Love Island, and the ‘lovely-looking young man’ in the corner shop. ‘Given goodish legs,’ Bennett observes, ‘shorts make people randier.’
When Bennett said Cecil Beaton was gay, Coral Browne insisted, ‘Not when he was with me, darling. Like a rat up a drainpipe.’ Bennett is also amused to know Judi Dench still enjoys a lively love life with her partner, an environmentalist, whom Maggie Smith called Squirrel Nutkin.
The book, made up of his diaries from 2016 to 2024, therefore is no mere catalogue of ailments. Nor is there any self-pity. Bennett looks out at the world and finds joy in small-scale things: porridge with half a sliced-up banana; wearing a pair of battered suede shoes; watching a heron standing in a stream; pottering around churches, ‘Rupert with his box of salad, me with my sandwiches of smoked salmon’. Bennett is as observant about the weather as any poet, noting ‘big bosomy clouds that suddenly give way to torrential rain’.
Bennett on the set of The Lady in the Van
Shuttling back and forth on frequently delayed trains between lovely homes in Primrose Hill and the Yorkshire Dales, Bennett’s big trick – classic misdirection, like a stage magician – is to pretend to be humble and provincial, with a regional accent carefully intact, but in actuality he is very shrewd, ambitious, independent-minded and cosmopolitan. Despite being the undisputed ‘chronicler of the toasted teacake’, Bennett has had hit plays at the National Theatre and on Broadway, where he met Judy Garland at a private party and Elizabeth Taylor sat on his knee. John Gielgud was in Bennett’s first West End play, Forty Years On. He received ‘umpteen postcards’ from Alec Guinness, arranging dinner dates, and the other day Bennett found a letter from Christopher Isherwood, with whom he went to supper. Barbra Streisand, Kenneth Williams, Vincent Price and Morrissey called at his house.
Snowdon ‘took me to Windsor Castle where he photographed me on a butcher’s bike full of corgis’. At some function or other, Bennett was glad to find himself sitting next to Gyles Brandreth, ‘which is a bonus as he’s easy to talk to’. Barry Cryer each week was phoning him up with jokes. Invited to meet royalty, ‘Camilla appeals, somewhere always a twinkle’.
The four members of the anti-establishment revue ‘Beyond the Fringe’
Given such a life, Bennett, I feel, works too hard at trying to convey modest outsider status. He’s not like Dame Margaret Drabble, he insists, or Sir William Golding: ‘I’m on the side of the bath while they do all the splashing.’
Though one of the Beyond The Fringe quartet, with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, Bennett is determined not to swank. He was ‘the lowliest and least funny of the group’, a silly and untrue sentiment. Miller makes frequent appearances in Enough Said. In one hilarious episode, taken short in Camden Town, Bennett has to waddle to Miller’s house for an emergency pair of underpants.
It’s sad that Miller and Bennett clearly never much liked each other – too competitive, maybe, too similar, Miller regretting he gave up medicine for the arts, Bennett wondering whether his true calling, once he’d gained a First, was to have remained at Oxford as a medieval historian.
Bennett complains about Miller’s boastful egomania, his continuous intellectual one-upmanship, going on about ‘the futility of all religion’, talking 19 to the dozen and refusing to allow himself to be corrected on matters of demonstrable historical fact. Finally, Miller glides away with Alzheimer’s, unable to recall Beyond The Fringe, or that he and Bennett were ever in it.
Enough said by Alan Bennett is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Bennett is more fully appreciative of Victoria Wood, who died in 2016. He’d met her at the avocado counter in Sainsbury’s, Lancaster branch. They gave speeches at Thora Hird’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey, both wishing they could ascend to the pulpit in a Stannah Stairlift. Bennett enjoyed the brass band at Wood’s own send-off, and he salutes her funniness and cleverness in the recreation of northern speech, particularly in Dinnerladies.
Bennett, throughout his work, is profoundly nostalgic for the north – his latest film, The Choral, in production during these diaries, is about Yorkshire music-making. He’s always mentioning Leeds in wartime, when the state paid for his education: ‘It delivered us out of poverty and put us on the road to a better life.’ Bennett mentions his parents a lot, e.g. their fad for home-brewed herb beer, which exploded and demolished the scullery.
Is there anything I hadn’t known before, as Bennett has never been slow to be autobiographical? It is news to me Bennett took riding lessons in Chislehurst, until he fell off; and an eye-opener that he likes the idea of taking drugs: ‘I’ve always found amphetamines delightful … Coke without sex I never quite saw the point of.’
At coming up to 92, surely a person can say and do what they jolly well please.
