Alan Bennett (2005) Untold Stories.

I had to check Allan Bennett is still alive. He’s 91 now. Books don’t have to be new to be read. His diary entries and moral outrage with Tony Blair as he cosied up to George Bush (junior) over the invasion of Iraq over dumbed up files that never existed…well, with the moron’s moron Trump treating the Doomsday Clock as a pinball machine that spits out Nobel Peace Prizes we’re beyond satire, but not common sense. Bennett has got more than a wee bit of that and a wee bit of this.

Untold Stories is a hotchpotch of different things. I liked the first part best. When he applied to Cambridge and Oxford, he asserted and believed that he’d become a vicar. There’s something of the creeping Jesus about Bennett. You could imagine him in that role. Not really believing in anything but carrying on because that’s what you do. Little old ladies depended on him.

His mum and dad married young. His dad worked as a butcher. A job he started when he was twelve and he didn’t like much. But that was that. That’s what you done in those days. He’d asked his boss  if he could  start a half-hour later, because he was getting married. Both his parents were shy—of others. But his employers, the Coop said no. He’d have to come in at his usual time.

His mother suffered from Depression (with a capital D). In later life she spent months in long-stay hospitals near Leeds. His father dutifully going every day to visit her and staying the whole day. I found that rather moving and wonderful.

Alan Bennett’s ambiguity was equally real. His brother was married. He wondered if this would be his life now. Having to leave London for Leeds. Trailing up and down to hospitals.

Unexpectedly he’d become something of a success. He’d achieved a First at Oxford. And toured with Dudley Moore and Peter Cooke and another guy—whose name I can’t remember, Jonathan Miller—to Edinburgh and Beyond the Fringe. But it was Allan Bennett’s name that people couldn’t remember. He was safe enough to escort Richard Burton’s wife to some glamourfest in New York, when she became an ex-wife, with Liz Taylor, the future Mrs Burton on the scene. Being gay and unseen helped.

And being never sure about things helped him see the outsider in others. That’s his great strength.

As a late cultural icon he got to make short plays for the BBC. Monologues. Usually some old bat, played by grand dames, such as Thora Hird or Maggie Smith, moaning about something that will happen soon. Unwatchable. What made them worse was they were meant to be funny.

I admire Bennett for his hatred of Rupert Murdoch and Maggie Thatcher and his great act of kindness. He wrote a play about it, with Dame Maggie Smith playing the thrawn Miss Shepherd, The Lady in the Van. He let her park her vehicles (there were more than one) in his Camden driveway for 15 years. For that alone, I salute you.  Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6