Alan Bennett's Diaries

I'm sure you've heard all the stories before. I mean,

I've such a limited repertoire.

I always write on odd bits of paper.

This is part of a cheque book.

"The most a writer can hope from a reader

"is that he or she should think...

" 'Here is somebody who knows what it is like to be me.' "

I don't know why that looks...

CHUCKLES: No. Anyway...

These are all pictures of me.

This is my diary and the notes I keep.

-DIRECTOR:

-Is it daily? Is it...?

-No, I don't keep it every day,

because so little happens to me,

but if there's anything I think is interesting, I write it down.

I've got odd diaries going back to the 1960s and earlier than that.

Some of the earlier ones are so embarrassing, I destroyed them.

"October 27th - to record Private Passions,

"Michael Berkeley's Radio 3 programme, which I have always liked

"as a more relaxed and less formulaic Desert Island Discs.

"Mind you, I have always resisted Private Passions too

"if only because my musical appreciation is so adolescent and

"tied to memory, with no specialised musical knowledge to it."

Sorry it's so laborious.

-PRODUCER LAUGHS:

-No!

So, Alan, this is Michael Berkeley, who I think you've met before?

-Oh, we've met before.

-We've seen each other.

We met at Downing Street.

ALL LAUGH

-That's a good line.

-Where else?

'Alan Bennett really needs no introduction.

'We all think we know him. He's the much-loved playwright and diarist

'who has been entertaining and moving us

'since Beyond The Fringe in 1960.

'I'm glad to say, though, Alan, that there's one aspect of you

'that is perhaps rather less known

'and that is the importance of music in your life.'

Well, I always feel, if I could have written music,

I wouldn't have written plays.

But some people can write to music, I mean, with music playing.

I can't do that.

What I tend to do is write and then,

if it's gone well, I then put some music on and even, um...

..well, not quite dance about, but nevertheless...

..unsuppress myself, as it were, to the music.

MUSIC: Gold And Silver Waltz by Franz Lehar

These are family photos.

That's my dad in the bowler hat. He always wore a bowler hat.

There's pictures of him on the sands with us as kids

and he's still got his bowler hat on.

I remember that shirt and hating it.

There was music right from my earliest childhood,

because my father was a very good amateur violinist

and his fiddle was always on the sideboard.

And when it was in its case, it seemed to me like

the most expensive and luxurious item in the house.

And we were never allowed to touch it, my brother and I,

except when my father made an abortive attempt to teach us

how to play, which we couldn't.

So this first music takes you back to him,

to your father on the violin?

Yes, he... It was the kind of thing

he would pick up his violin and play along to.

Music from Lehar's Gold And Silver Waltz conducted by Michael Dittrich.

MUSIC CONTINUES

Now this, this is the thing about the barbers.

"September 23rd, 2015.

"A minor breakthrough today when I go to my barbers,

"Ossie's in Camden Town,

"and for the first time in my life and at the age of 81,

"license Azak, my barber, to trim my eyebrows.

"It's a cosmetic refinement I've always resisted in the past

"on the assumption that once trimmed,

"the eyebrows would grow more luxuriantly

"and I feared I would end up looking like Bernard Ingham,

"Mrs Thatcher's press secretary

"or - and I mention him in the interests of balance

"although he's only just left us -

"Denis Healey." Um...

Does that make sense?

Hmm. Mm-hmm?

"However, as I say, I'm getting on and so there will hardly be time for

"the development of such overhanging thickets, so today I'm tidied up.

"The last time I remember being plagued with similar thoughts

"was when I was 17 and had not yet begun to shave.

"Though most of my contemporaries had been shaving for years,

"being fair and rather behind the rest, I reasoned that in my case

"there was no need and that once I started, I would have to go on.

"But a few months later, I was in the Army

"and so the decision was taken out of my hands."

I enjoyed doing drill.

When it was going well and when you knew what you were doing,

it was, I suppose, a bit like a dance.

That's a picture of me in 1988.

I don't know how that's got in there, but anyway.

-It's not actually a book? It's loose?

-No, it's loose.

But it's freehand because that's how I write anyway.

This then goes to a lovely woman called Sue Powell,

who types the whole thing.

She knows more about me than anybody, really, because

there's everything in the diaries. I don't censor my diaries.

If they were printed in their entirety,

I don't think it would do me any good at all!

HE CHUCKLES

I go to his house to pick up the next instalment

and I'm usually simultaneously

delivering the last year that I've done

so we probably actually only meet about once a year.

I'll receive a file full of papers like this

and sometimes it's a little bit tatty and disordered

and I just make my way through.

I live in fear of dropping it...

..and it scattering all over the floor and I have to work out

the order in which it needs to go back. No, they're not numbered.

This is just the way he writes them and they come to me.

I suspect that he writes it and puts it away

and doesn't think about it again, really,

until it comes to the next entry.

So, as far as I'm aware, this is unedited.

And then I've gone through the manuscripts to see

what I'm happy to see published.

I mean, for instance, I wouldn't necessarily put..

..very personal things in straightaway, whereas, you know,

ten years on, it doesn't matter, really.

This is Dinah Wood, who's my editor at Faber.

I don't care for dogs much, but...

but she's lovely.

Hi.

-Hi.

-Hello.

Now, I've got my homework.

Very good.

Now, that's the one we thought for the cover.

-Right...

-Right. Great.

There's one or two things I've still not decided on.

What about the piece about the National Theatre?

That's in there.

I think it should go in, but you weren't...

-No, I assumed that was going in.

-Oh, OK. Good, good.

-DIRECTOR:

-So this is, what - ten years?

-Yeah.

-Mmm.

And Alan did the original selection?

Yeah. All these Post-it Notes are all homework for Alan, who then

does crosses or ticks beside things

and so this pile gets bigger and bigger as new printouts

with things resolved get added.

I occasionally put a question mark,

but that's about as strong, as rigorous as it gets!

Does it have a different mood to the other two volumes, this one?

I don't... Doesn't seem to me much different.

The one that was the most...fraught,

I suppose, was the one when I'd had cancer in 1997 and so,

that was always, until it gradually became plain

that I was going to survive, that was fairly...

on the edge of things.

So Alan highlighted all the bits to add and I added all those and then

I read the whole lot again

and I largely added descriptions of robins!

Yes! Dinah particularly liked the glimpses of wildlife

-in the diary.

-There's a lot of...

Seeing the occasional bird out of the window.

Because Untold Stories, you're sitting at your window looking out

-and you're looking at drug dealers, builders, teenagers.

-That's right.

As I used to be looking at Miss Shepherd when she was there.

That's Miss Shepherd.

That's the van when it was in the street, or one of them.

The windows had gone, so she had curtains there.

"May 21st, 2015.

"To Hay-on-Wye with Nick Hytner and Dinah Wood.

"A much longer ride in time terms

"than the one to Leeds that I'm used to, though it's much nearer.

"The atmosphere, a busy tented enclosure, is like a county show,

"with literature standing in for husbandry

"and authors being led about like pedigree cattle."

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to this very special

preview of The Lady In The Van.

The story is broadly about a woman who was known as Mary Shepherd

who came, for a short while, in her van, to live outside Alan's house

and in fact stayed for 15 years.

I keep a diary, not a daily diary, but if anything droll happened

or anything sad or whatever, I would write it down.

And I'd no notion how long she was going to be there

and I knew I certainly couldn't write about her while she was alive.

The reason I did do it was that

it happened that she died just before The London Review Of Books

had its tenth anniversary and they said would I write something,

and so that was the only thing I could write about.

-The disciple whom Jesus loved?

-No. The name's Bennett.

An educated woman and living in a van.

I'm studying incognito...

-She had her own political party, didn't she?

-Oh, yes, she did.

She founded something called...

-MAN:

-Ukip!

LAUGHTER

She was well to the right of Ukip. She was...

She was very, very much opposed to the Common Market, as it was then...

Ukip!

..and used to sell pamphlets outside Williams & Glyn's Bank

in Camden High Street

with chalked notices about the evils of the Common Market.

And then she founded a political party called...

-Oh...

-Fidelis.

-Fidelis Party, that's right.

She only had about six members, of which I was one.

LAUGHTER

But she immediately went from having founded a political party

to assuming that she would be elected Prime Minister,

but if she were elected Prime Minister, she came and asked me

in all seriousness whether

I thought that she could live in the van outside Downing Street...

LAUGHTER

..rather than in Downing Street itself.

This was about the time when Mrs Thatcher was in the ascendant

and the notion of a wilful woman living in a van

with Cabinet ministers queuing up to be told what to do

had some reality to it.

This is when she got a Reliant Robin, which,

unlike the van, did used to go.

I mean, it made a hell of a din.

The other van would be over there in the garden.

The story told by this film took place 40 and more years ago

and Miss Shepherd is long since dead.

She was difficult and eccentric...

..but above all, she was poor.

And these days particularly, the poor don't get much of a look-in.

Poverty is as much a moral failing today as it was under the Tudors.

"If the film has a point,

"it's about fairness and tolerance and, however grudgingly,

"helping the less fortunate,

"who are not well thought of these days

"and now likely to be even less so."

That was written just after the election

but I don't kid myself and think it would do any good.

This is my Grandad Peel,

who drowned himself when he was unemployed

in...1926, I think.

And that's Mam and Dad at the back of 92A Otley Road,

where Dad's shop was.

You went into the house, up this passage

and you went straight into the sitting room, which always

deeply embarrassed me as a boy.

I took that in 1953.

Once you were a teenager, Alan,

you started going to weekly concerts in Leeds Town Hall, I think,

and sat in what was probably the cheapest seats,

behind the orchestra.

Well, it really characterised my youth, going to those concerts.

It was the real bones of my youth

going every week and sometimes twice a week,

because they sometimes gave concerts on Wednesday as well.

I remember a boy called Michael Fielder,

who was a very talented pianist,

and they were going to play at the concert

Brahms' Second Piano Concerto, which I had never heard,

and Michael Fielder sang me the opening theme of the Brahms.

HE HUMS THE TUNE

And I can hear him singing it now

and that would be 1951 that I first heard it.

MUSIC: Piano Concerto Number 2 by Johannes Brahms

All my life I've worn a tie.

Mam... It sounds terrible cos it sounds so disciplinarian,

but it wasn't like that,

but she never let us wear open-necked shirts,

because she thought somehow, that made you more prone to TB.

But TB was the great scourge.

I mean, two people next door to us in Otley died of TB.

That's my dad when he was put to butchering by his stepmother

when he was 12, I think, for which he never really forgave her.

My father was such a gentle soul

but he never had a good word for his stepmother.

She was always known in the family for having said to my brother,

"Get off that stool or I'll kick you off!"

My brother and I get on very well,

and he and Ruth come to my plays and whatever,

but he's never wanted anything to do with show business

or what my father would have called splother.

How much older is he?

He's three years to the day. Our birthdays are on the same day.

That's Dad in the shop.

Gordon and me used to help make the sausages,

only...well, my sausages, anyway, used to burst.

I didn't quite get the hang of it!

This is May 8th, and it's the day after the election, I think.

"A feeling of bereavement in the street.

"I shop for supper and, unprompted, a grey-haired woman in the fish shop

"bursts out, 'It means I shall have a Tory government

" 'for the rest of my life.'

"In the library, they say, 'Good morning,

" 'though we've just been trying to think what's good about it.' "

"May 9th, my birthday.

"A nice woman in a leopardskin coat who always speaks

"wishes me a happy birthday.

"I say that I wish it was. 'Why, what's happened?'

" 'Last Thursday, the election.'

" 'Oh, you don't want to worry about that. They're all the same.'

"At which point - we're in Shepherd's, the grocers -

"I hear myself, as very rarely, shouting at the top of my voice,

" 'No, they are not all the same. This lot are self-seeking liars!

" 'The Cabinet included.

" 'And we're landed with them for another five years.'

"She tries to calm me down but I tell her not to bother,

"with other customers peeping round the shelves

"to see who's making all this din.

"She's waiting outside the shop

"with a cake she's bought me for my birthday, and I kind of apologise.

"But as I walk back home, I wonder how long it will be

"before this crew turn their attention to the BBC."

Well...

I love the detail of the cake.

Yes, I know! It made me feel terrible. Anyway...

So, are you still shouting at people in Shepherd's?

I very, very rarely shout...

I'm too self-conscious to shout.

But...

I don't know, it seemed appropriate then.

This is Beyond The Fringe, which was 1960 or '61.

APPLAUSE

How will it be, this end of which you have spoken, Brother?

Aye, how will it be?

And photographs of us taken by Lewis Morley.

I can't bear to think of it now.

-Why?

-Well, it was just embarrassing, you know.

Four, three, two, one...

zero.

-ALL CHANT:

-Now is the end. There is the world.

It was GMT, wasn't it?

LAUGHTER

That's Dudley Moore. And that's me.

That's Peter Cook and that's Jonathan Miller.

And this is Brighton Pier.

Brighton was the only place which hated it

and the theatre was only half full,

and then by the end, it was even a quarter full

because everybody'd left.

'Welcome to the 1405 Virgin Trains service to Leeds.

'Train guard Bob Taylor speaking.

'We shall be calling at Peterborough, Doncaster,

'Wakefield Westgate, Leeds...'

We go up home, I call it home,

but we go up to Yorkshire every fortnight.

So there's often stuff on the train.

This is one of those.

"21st May, 2012.

"A plumpish young man gets off the train at Leeds just behind me.

" 'Aren't you famous?'

" 'Well, I can't be, can I, if you don't know my name?'

" 'It's, uh... It's Alan something.'

" 'Yes.'

" 'From Scarborough?'

" 'No.'

" 'So, which Alan are you?'

" 'I'm another Alan.'

" 'Are you just a lookalike?'

" 'Well, you could say so.'

"He pats my arm consolingly. 'Be happy with that.' "

It's the patting of the arm that I liked!

My whole life being consoled.

'..passengers who have joined this Virgin Trains service

'at Peterborough...'

"May 15th. Shortly after the East Coast franchise had been sold off

"to a tie-up between Virgin and Stagecoach,

"I'm sitting waiting for Rupert on Leeds Station

"when this notice is flashed up."

" 'Hello, Leeds. Meet Virgin Trains.

" 'We've just arrived and we can't wait to get to know you.'

" 'And to take you for every penny you've got.' "

MUSIC: Act III trio from Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss

I heard Der Rosenkavalier in the Grand Theatre in Leeds in 1951.

I was a very naive boy.

I mean, it starts off with Octavian,

who is the lover of the Marschallin,

and they're having breakfast together.

And I just thought he'd called by for tea and toast.

I didn't realised he'd been spending the night with her.

But at the same time, the last act anyway, certainly,

is all about renunciation and about the impossibility of love

and this I didn't need explaining.

I understood that at 17,

and I felt that was what my life was going to be like.

But I know the music and I play the music,

but I've never wanted to see another production.

It must have gone home to me, because I came out and I think the theatre

had recently been repainted

and my hands were covered in the gilt from the bar of the gods

that I'd been gripping during the music.

"September 11th.

"David Cameron has been in Leeds, preaching to businessmen

"the virtues of what he calls the smart state.

"This seems to be a state that

"gets away with doing as little as possible for its citizens

"and shuffling as many responsibilities as it can

"onto whomever thinks they can make a profit out of them.

"I'm glad there wasn't a smart state

"when I was being brought up in Leeds.

"A state that was un-smart enough

"to see me and others like me educated free of charge

"and sent on at the city's expense to university,

"provided with splendid libraries, cheap transport

"and a terrific art gallery, not to mention the city's hospitals.

"Smart, to Mr Cameron, seems to mean

"doing as little as one can get away with and calling it enterprise.

"Smart, as in smart aleck, smart of the smart answer,

"which I'm sure Mr Cameron has to hand.

"Dead smart."

Well, I believe in the state because I owe everything to the state.

And that's not the sentimental view,

but the notion that the state is some sort of villain...

I know it sounds absurd, and I hate the phrase "nanny state",

but I can see the state as maternal.

I don't think that's foolish.

It's one of my life's regrets that we've never kept a donkey.

I don't know whether that's worthwhile saying.

Well... I'd long for a donkey.

I used to go and stay with Alec and Merula Guinness in Hampshire.

And there was a donkey in the next field.

I remember once I was sitting there, feeling rather sorry for myself,

I don't know why. But this donkey came up and licked my head.

And I thought, how wonderful to have a sympathetic creature like that,

because they are, they just are immensely sympathetic.

You do a rather famous Eeyore.

Yes, I know, but that's...

That's less to do with a donkey than me being a miserable sod!

MUSIC: I Can Give You The Starlight by Ivor Novello

"Rupert, having spent most of the evening watching Wuthering Heights,

"turns to me at the finish and says, 'You're rather like Heathcliff.'

"Me, gratified: 'Really?'

"Rupert: 'Yeah.

-" 'Difficult, Northern, and a

-BLEEP.'

-"

I don't think he wanted it repeating.

# Has changed my ways and taught me

# And brought me... #

So, this is I Can Give You The Starlight by Ivor Novello,

sung by Mary Ellis.

My partner of 23 years, he's Welsh.

And he claims to be distantly related to Ivor Novello.

But then I suspect lots of people in Wales do that.

But it reminds him of his grandma and it reminds me of mine.

# I can give you the ocean

# Deep and tender devotion... #

These are pictures of our civil partnership...

If I can get the box open.

..which was in 2006...

..at Camden Registry Office.

# Call and I shall be

# All you ask of me

# Music in spring

# Flowers for a king

# All these I bring to you. #

That's Kate, Jonathan Miller's daughter,

who's Rupert's best friend.

And that's Owen, who's Rupert's younger brother.

You can't see, but behind them are Diana and Graham, Rupert's parents.

The registrar wanted to zhuzh it up a bit, rather,

and said, "Are you having music?" "No, we're not having music."

"Are you having flowers?"

"Not really."

I think Rupert would have been happy to have much more of a do,

but it was the simplest possible occasion.

They might be at a funeral, I mean...

HE LAUGHS

Everybody very serious.

It was only afterwards I realised

that it was virtually a rerun of the way my parents got married.

But anyway...

..it's lasted.

HE LAUGHS

I don't know whether we even went out to supper.

Probably we were trying not to make it feel different, really.

I felt we were just trying to make it ordinary.

Why did you want to do it, then?

Well, there were all sorts of reasons.

Particularly with me getting on

and the fact that I'm much older than Rupert. If I died,

I wanted my estate to go to him.

So that was one reason. But the other reason was...

I think even at that time,

you felt you were making some sort of a declaration, really.

We're going to move now to what some people think of as an almost perfect

musical expression of Christian faith,

the St Matthew Passion by Bach.

They did the St Matthew Passion at Leeds Parish Church

in the Monday in Holy Week.

And I used to go with the church youth club.

I was very religious at the time.

The chorales were what appealed to me.

And I think in the parish church,

they were treated as hymns and the audience joined in and sang.

Hymns particularly are something you never really get rid of, really.

They're always there.

And they're the thing that reduces me to tears, or can do.

CHOIR SINGS: St Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome to Clapham,

if this is your first time here.

It's so lovely to see a full church.

LAUGHTER

If you'd like to come at 11 o'clock tomorrow, you'll be most welcome.

I'm the churchwarden.

But it is really lovely to be able to celebrate the wonderful people

that we have in our village.

So will you please welcome Mr Alan Bennett?

APPLAUSE

They never say to me, "Oh, it's good this year." There's never...

Am I the only person who tells us a little bit like that?

Telling a story is always a difficult problem.

I've never been very good at plots. I can do dialogue fairly happily,

but I can never think of any reason why anybody should come on the stage

and when they should go off the stage. And so,

my confidence in my own storytelling isn't good.

'I don't have much left in the way of belief,

'certainly not in the way of petitioning God for anything,

'but when I do miss God is'

not having anyone to thank

when I've had a deliverance or a stroke of luck.

I just feel I want to be grateful to someone

and there's no-one to be grateful to.

'You were quite a pious young person.

'As a boy, I was very religious, but none of that is left.

'Although I'm more religious than Rupert,

'who is very hot on any evidence,

'any remnant of religious belief on my part.'

If we go into old churches, which we do quite a bit,

until middle life, I think, I would kneel down or I would sit anyway

and maybe say something,

but not any more.

HE CHUCKLES

And Rupert dislikes any church which has too much evidence of religion

about it. He prefers a church that's absolutely plain.

He'll maybe run to a cross on the altar but not much more than that.

-Enjoy your dinner.

-Thank you.

MUSIC: Symphony Number 1 by William Walton

Music from the first movement of William Walton's Symphony Number 1

in B flat minor in a recording made, actually, in Leeds Town Hall.

Right!

The first time I heard it, I was absolutely mystified by it.

I mean, I think I spent the time counting the organ pipes

because I was just so bored.

And then the next time, I was at home with it, you know,

so it had gone in.

Yes. I remember going in there.

So, what was this?

This was the grown-ups' library.

And you went into the children's library through there.

-Hi.

-Hello.

I was saying, the thing where you had your books stamped,

-we used to be in the centre of the room.

-Oh, right.

Yeah. But it was quite an intimidating place to come into

-when you were a child.

-Really?

-Yeah.

There was a British Legion man with lots of medals

and if you made any noise at all, he would shout at you.

THEY LAUGH

"I've always been happy in libraries,

"though without ever being entirely at ease there.

"A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party,

"with everybody standing with their back to me.

"I could not find a way in.

"The first library I did find my way into was the Armley Public Library

"in Leeds, where a reader's ticket cost tuppence in 1940.

"Not tuppence a time or even tuppence a year.

"But just tuppence.

"That was all you ever had to pay."

-Hi.

-Hello there.

-Photocopying, I'm afraid.

-That's all right.

What have you got?

-Bye.

-Bye.

-Bye.

-See you later.

"5th March, 2014.

"On my walk, I passed the Primrose Hill Community Library,

"which is closed to borrowers today but open for children,

"who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult,

"presumably learning to read, others in groups being told stories,

"and at every table, children reading on their own.

"This library is one of those institutions that Mark Littlewood,

"the head of the right-wing think tank

"the Institute of Economic Affairs,

"said would make a useful retail outlet,

"a facility and a building for which

"there was no longer a social purpose.

"As a so-called economist, Littlewood presumably thinks

"the place would be better used as a Pizza Hut."

Hmm.

The Institute of Economic Affairs, it shelters behind this title -

people will think it's a...

you know, an apolitical organisation, but it's not,

it's a right-wing pressure group.

And then there's the letter from the New York Public Library

about becoming a Library Lion.

-Hi.

-Hi.

What happened?

Oh, I don't know. I'm totally confused.

I mean, I thought we were to be presented with this medal

but in fact, they said, "Put this on."

Where is everybody? Where's your entourage?

Well, they were supposed to come at seven, you see, so, I mean...

They'll be here. In due course.

Have you met your fellow Lions?

No. I think Gloria Steinem is the one in bobble trousers.

But other than that, I don't know.

I didn't know until I was packing that it was a black-tie affair

and I'd got so far on with my packing, I couldn't face unpacking,

and so I'm just wearing a suit.

That's the nice thing about getting older.

If I were 18 and I'd found that out,

I'd have moved heaven and earth not to be conspicuous.

But when you're older, you don't care, so it's all right.

APPLAUSE

The primary purpose, though, tonight

is to recognise our five outstanding Lions and their inspired

contributions to our world.

They include award-winning author and playwright Alan Bennett...

APPLAUSE

Yes, I think it's a fundraiser.

Though I can't imagine many people would pay much to come and see me!

Do you know what people have to pay?

I think... I don't like to say,

but I think it's 100,000 a table, I think.

MUSIC: Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered by Rodgers and Hart

# After one whole quart of brandy

# Like a daisy, I'm awake

# With no Bromo-Seltzer handy

# I don't even shake... #

This was when Nicholas Hytner did Private Passions in 2002.

One of the records he chose was

Ella Fitzgerald singing Bewitched, which I think is from Kiss Me Kate.

And I'd never heard it...

I never listened to the words, really.

And the words are wonderfully, wonderfully funny

and it was one of the strands that came together in The History Boys,

the play about school that I wrote,

when it was sung by Sam Barnett, as a...

..as a gay song, really, and...

and was very both funny and touching, really, in the play.

-SAMUEL BARNETT:

-# I'm wild again

# Beguiled again

# A simpering, whimpering child again

# Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I... #

"11th June, 2006, New York.

"Back here for the second time in six weeks,

"to Lynn's 16th Street apartment,

"which is the penthouse of a small 1930s skyscraper

"with a balcony all the way around

"and views uptown to the Chrysler Building and Central Park

"and to the west the Hudson and the Jersey shore.

"It's warm and windy, and sitting in the bedroom with the door open,

"I can see the Empire State Building reflected in the mirror opposite."

# I'll sing to him, each spring to him

# And worship the trousers that cling to him

# Bewitched... #

"We have a long brunch at the Odeon,

"then walk back to 16th Street to prepare for the Tonys this evening.

"In the event of our winning the Best Play award,

"we had agreed beforehand that

"the boys should all come up to receive it, which indeed they do.

"And then bundled out through a back door and across the street

"to Rockefeller Plaza,

"where a whole floor has been given over to the press.

"I'm thrust blinking onto a stage facing a battery of lights while

"questions come out of the darkness, the best of which

"is, 'Do you think this award will kick-start your career?'

"News of my lacklustre performance on this podium must have got round

"quickly, because I'm then taken down a long corridor off which

"various TV shows and radio shows have mics and cameras

"and there's more humiliation.

" 'Do you want him?' asks the PA at each doorway,

"the answer more often than not being, 'Nah'.

"So, I only score about four brief interviews

"before I'm pushed through another door and find

"I'm suddenly back in the street in the rain

"and it's all more or less over."

MUSIC: Alto Rhapsody by Johannes Brahms

Kathleen Ferrier's voice in the Alto Rhapsody,

it is a voice like no other.

It's so rich and yet it's austere.

My parents heard her very, very early on, I suppose, in her career

in about 1946,

when she came to Leeds and did a concert at Brunswick Chapel

in the slums of South Leeds.

And they came home full of this young woman they'd heard singing,

and Kathleen Ferrier's voice drifting out over the grimy snow

is really what music means to me, in a way.

And that's in Yorkshire, in their garden,

when they were retired.

So that's the house you now have.

Yes. Yes.

So, when did you buy the house in Clapham?

1966.

Which was when my dad was able to give up the shop.

So, have you been going up there since '66, really?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it had a difficult start because my mother, in her...

what...60s, I suppose, began to suffer from depression.

Her first onset of depression came,

I suppose, with the stress of moving, really,

so for the first four or five weeks, she was in hospital

and then recovered very quickly and came back

and she thought it was the most wonderful place when she was better.

But in some ways,

it was the happiest time of their lives then.

-Hiya, are you all right?

-"Easter Saturday, Yorkshire.

"With a bad ankle,

"I edge my way carefully down the stairs

"and delicately round the garden.

"I still have the absurd notion that, as with any other ailment,

"age and infirmity will run its course and I will recover from it.

"But there is no recovery, or only one,

"it doesn't always occur."

That's me in the garden. I'm not a gardener.

That's about all I'm fit for -

cutting down the Alchemilla mollis, this is.

Dad loved having a garden, which he'd never had all his life.

Did he live long there?

No. From 1966 till 1974.

And Mam was...

She began to suffer from depression, you can see it in her face.

You know, she is not well.

But she did live there on her own for a while, did she?

Yes, she did.

But it wasn't easy.

I mean, it can never be easy anyway if you have been married to somebody

for nearly 50 years, you know.

But at that time, depression wasn't really talked about.

It was a total mystery to me and my father and my brother.

Somebody totally transformed, their personality just altered.

CLOCK CHIMES THE HOUR

The tree is not very old,

but the fairy...

Well, she must be all of 84 years old, really.

She's been refurbished in various ways.

I mean, she lost her wings and my mam made her wings out of foil

and a skirt out of a lampshade fringe.

My mother used to make lampshades,

it was a thing she liked doing.

But she always looks to me,

whenever I see her every Christmas, as being really terrified.

Terrified of being hung by the neck on the Christmas tree, I imagine.

# Softly and gently

# Dearly ransomed soul... #

Softly And Gently Dear Parted Soul.

This is a piece which I know is quite important to you.

It's The Dream Of Gerontius, by Elgar.

I wonder, when you listen to this, what you think,

and whether this too takes you back.

Well, again, it's to Leeds Town Hall.

Elgar, I wouldn't have been sitting behind the orchestra when I heard it

because when there was a chorus,

we were all displaced and had to sit in the body of the hall.

It somehow embodies for me the North

and a choral society in the North.

MUSIC CONTINUES

This is an entry for 2007 about my father,

who, during the war, eked out his Co-op butcher's income

by making fretwork toys

which he sold to a smart toy shop down County Arcade in Leeds.

Penguins were his speciality.

He used to paint them and they would be totally featureless

until he put the eye in and then they became creatures.

But I wrote about this in my diary in the London Review Of Books

and a woman wrote to me,

saying that her late husband collected penguins and they had one

that they thought might be one that my father had made.

And she sent me a picture and it was one of my dad's penguins.

And then she sent me the actual penguin.

So it's one of the few relics I have of my father.

But it's a cheerful piece.

I smile when I look at it.

This is a picture by Anthony Crolla

and it's on the cover of the book which is currently

and maybe will end up being called Keeping On Keeping On.

Rupert says, "As long as it's not called Banging On Banging On,"

which some of it is, but anyway...

That's part of keeping on.

And that's the final entry for the diaries

-because it makes it a bit more of a conclusion.

-Yeah.

It's December 31st, 2015.

"Wanting to wind up this year with something resounding, I'm at a loss.

"It's that flat time after Christmas when nothing happens

"and on this last afternoon of 2015, little occurs.

"I'm now 81,

"which, though it has been a long time coming,

"is still a bit of a surprise.

"I'm comforted, as I have been in the past,

"by something said by the Argentinian author Borges.

" 'All the books I have ever written

" 'fill me only with a complex feeling of repentance.'

"I take this to mean that he's never written the perfect book...

"..as who has?

"So, we keep on keeping on."

Perfect!

MUSIC: Softly And Gently by Elgar

I think about the boy I was,

listening to that and to other stuff in Leeds Town Hall,

and I think, if I could come up behind myself,

as I was then and as a boy wondering what life had in store,

I think I'd just say, "It's going to be all right."

And it has been all right.

I've been very lucky.

Hm.

"Postscript.

"Thursday, June 23rd, 2016, the day of the referendum,

"I spend sitting at the kitchen table,

"correcting the proofs of these diaries,

"finishing them on Friday morning

"before going off to Yorkshire in despair.

"I imagine this must have been what Munich was like in 1938.

"Half the nation rejoicing at a supposed deliverance,

"the other half stunned by the country's self-serving cowardice.

"Well...we shall see."