The Complete Talking Heads (12 page)

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Authors: Alan Bennett

BOOK: The Complete Talking Heads
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She puts her hand down.
Here’s this cream cracker.
She rubs it.
Naught wrong with it.
She eats it.
Making a lot of crumbs. Have to have a surreptitious go with the Ewbank. ‘Doris. The Ewbank is out of bounds.’ Out of bounds to her too, by the looks of it. A cream cracker under the settee. She wants reporting. Can’t report her now. I’ve destroyed the evidence.
Pause.
I could put another one under, they’d never know. Except they might say it was me. ‘Squatting biscuits under the settee, Doris. You’re not fit to be on your own. You’d be better off in Stafford House.’
Pause.
We were always on our own, me and Wilfred. We weren’t gregarious. We just weren’t the gregarious type. He thought he was, but he wasn’t.
Mix. I don’t want to mix. Comes to the finish and they suddenly think you want to mix. I don’t want to be stuck with a lot of old lasses. And they all smell of pee. And daft half of them, banging tambourines. You go daft there, there’s nowhere else for you to go but daft. Wearing somebody else’s frock. They even mix up your teeth. I am H.A.P.P.Y. I am not H.A.P.P.Y. I am un-H.A.P.P.Y. Or I would be.
And Zulema says, ‘You don’t understand, Doris. You’re not up to date. They have lockers, now. Flowerbeds. They have their hair done. They go on trips to Wharfedale.’ I said, ‘Yes. Smelling of pee.’ She said, ‘You’re prejudiced, you.’ I said, ‘I am, where hygiene’s concerned.’
When people were clean and the streets were clean and it was all clean and you could walk down the street and folks smiled and passed the time of day, I’d leave the door on the latch and go on to the end for some toffee, and when I came back Dad was home and the cloth was on and the plates out and we’d have our tea. Then we’d side the pots and I’d wash up while he read the paper and we’d eat the toffees and listen to the wireless all them years ago when we were first married and I was having the baby.
Doris and Wilfred. They don’t get called Doris now. They don’t get called Wilfred. Museum, names like that. That’s what they’re all called in Stafford House. Alice and Doris. Mabel and Gladys. Antiques. Keep them under lock and key ‘What’s your name? Doris? Right. Pack your case.You belong in Stafford House.’
A home. Not me. No fear.
She closes her eyes. A pause.
POLICEMAN’S VOICE. Hello. Hello.
Doris opens her eyes but
doesn’t
speak.
Are you all right?
Pause.
DORIS. No. I’m all right.
POLICEMAN. Are you sure?
DORIS. Yes.
POLICEMAN. Your light was off.
DORIS. I was having a nap.
POLICEMAN. Sorry. Take care.
He goes.
DORIS. Thank you.
She
calls again.
Thank you.
Long pause.
You’ve done it now, Doris. Done it now, Wilfred.
Pause.
I wish I was ready for bed. All washed and in a clean nightie and the bottle in, all sweet and crisp and clean like when I was little on Baking Night, sat in front of the fire with my long hair still.
Her eyes close and she sings a little to herself. The song, which she only half remembers, is My Alice Blue Gown.
Pause.
Never mind. It’s done with now, anyway.
LIGHT FADES.
T
hese six monologues have been a long time coming: I’ve been intermittently trying to write them since 1988 when the first series went out. Had I not stopped at six then, I think I could have gone on and written another half dozen without too much trouble, but seeing the first lot produced with a measure of success made the next batch harder to do. I’ve kept putting them aside and even when they were, in effect, finished I left them in a drawer for a year as I felt they were too gloomy to visit on the public.
This gloom is not deliberate: it is just the way they have turned out. Nor is it that, as I grow older, I take a grimmer view of the world. It’s simply that, though I may sit down with the intention of writing something funny, it seldom comes out that way any more. I don’t feel called upon to offer any further explanation, though I shall doubtless be asked to account for it, if only by students.
A few years after the televising of the first series of
Talking Heads
they were made part of the A Level syllabus. While I was not unflattered by this it did land me with dozens of letters from candidates wanting a low-down on the text. Some of them, it was plain, thought that writing to the author was a useful way of getting their homework done for them; others were more serious, genuinely feeling that I could give them some clues as to the inner meaning of what I had written. I fell in with very few of these requests, generally sending a postcard saying that their ideas about the monologues were as good as mine and they should treat me like a dead author, who was thus unavailable for comment.
This was not entirely facetious. A playwright is not the best person to talk about his own work for the simple reason that he is often unaware of what he has written. Someone (I think, Tom Stoppard) has compared the playwright confronted by his critics to a passage through Customs. Under the impression he has nothing to declare the playwright heads confidently for the Green exit. Alerted (and irritated) by this air of confidence an official of the Customs and Excise steps forward and asks our writer formally ‘Have you any contraband?’ ‘No,’ smiles the playwright. ‘Very well,’ says the officer, ‘kindly open your suitcase.’ Happy to comply (he has nothing to be ashamed of, after all) the playwright throws back the lid. Whereupon to his horror there lie revealed a pair of disgustingly dirty underpants and some extremely pungent socks. The playwright is covered in confusion; for though these underpants are undoubtedly his and the socks too, nevertheless he has no recollection of having packed them, still less of giving them pride of place on top of his belongings. The customs officer sniffs (as well he might). However, since
there is as yet no law against the import of dirty underpants or smelly socks, the officer gingerly puts them on one side and delves further into the playwright’s case.
The next revelation is some photographs. These too take the playwright by surprise. Had he packed them? Surely not. But they are most certainly his: this is a photograph of his father and here are three photographs of his mother and at least half a dozen of himself. ‘Rather fond of ourselves, aren’t we sir?’ murmurs the customs man insolently. The playwright stammers some excuse, only thankful that the snaps are after all quite decent. But his relief is premature because, after sifting through yet more soiled clothing, the customs man now unearths another photograph: it is the playwright again, only this time he has his trousers down, he is smiling and with every appearance of pride he is showing his bottom to the camera. Now not only does the playwright not remember packing this photograph, he doesn’t even remember it being taken. But this is him; those are his trousers; that is his smile and, yes, that, without question, is his bottom. ‘One of our holiday snaps is it, sir?’ sneers the customs officer. ‘I should keep that covered up if I were you. We all have one, you know.’
And so the embarrassing examination goes on, the searcher uncovering ever more outrageous items - ideas the playwright thought he had long since discarded, an old marriage, a dead teacher and even a body or two locked in a long forgotten embrace, none of which the playwright ever dreamed of packing but which somehow have found their way into this commodious suitcase, his play.
So there is not much point in my telling you or the A Level students what
Talking Heads
is about or what I have put into my particular suitcase. All I can do is list some of the contents, note some of the themes (or at any rate recurrences), trace the origins of some of these pieces (insofar as I am aware of them) and link them occasionally with other stuff that I’ve written, always remembering that the relationship between life and art is never as straightforward as the reader or the audience tend to imagine.
That fictional characters are not drawn directly from life is a truism. Evelyn Waugh’s epigraph to
Brideshead Revisited
puts it succinctly: ‘I am not I; thou are not he or she; they are not they.’ But such a straightforward disavowal is misleading, because characters
are
taken from life: it’s just that they are seldom yanked out of it quite so unceremoniously as the public imagines. They aren’t hi-jacked unchanged into art or shoved just as they are onto the page or in front of the camera:
the playwright or novelist has to take them to Costume or Make-up in order to alter their appearance and sometimes he even takes them to a surgeon to change their sex. So that when the writer has finished with them they come on as someone far removed from the character they started off as, yet still, as in dreams, sharing his or her original identity.
And as it is with characters so it is with places. I hope no one ever tries to construct an exact topography of these or any of my other plays because I use street names at random, generally picking out the names I remember from my childhood in Leeds regardless of their geographical location. The posh suburbs then were Lawnswood and Alwoodley, and that still holds good, but otherwise the place I have in my head is only distantly related to Leeds as it is now and as in dreams, again, one landscape adjoins another without logic or possibility. In
Playing Sandwiches,
for instance, Wilfred has been an attendant at the Derby Baths, but of course the Derby Baths aren’t in Leeds they’re in Blackpool, as I’m sure many viewers will write and tell me. I imagine that in my cavalier (or slipshod) attitude to topography I’m not untypical which leads me to suppose that handbooks to Proust, say, or keys to Dickens, tell only a fraction of the truth.
I note the recurrences, which may indicate preoccupations, though they may equally well betray the poverty of my imagination: there are two dogs, for instance, one a chow with an arthritic hip that gets to run along the Scarborough sands in
Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet
, the other a noisy alsatian which gets its owner acquitted in
The Outside Dog.
It was only when the monologues were being edited that I realised I had called both dogs Tina, which in
A Woman of No Importance
is also the name of Mr Cressell and Mr Rudyard’s Jack Russell.
Two characters have strokes; two receive counselling; one husband is a murderer, another character is said to be a murderer (by virtue of being a tobacconist); and another husband gets murdered. The murders mystify me, the strokes less so as I am getting to the age when that sort of thing begins to nag, though that isn’t really why they figure here. What can or cannot be said is a staple of the drama and it’s in this regard rather than attempting an accurate depiction of the condition that I’ve written about strokes. Or ‘cerebral incidents’ as neurologists tend to call them nowadays, doctors as inhibited in their own speech as some of the stricken patients whom they are treating.
That Violet’s account of the last visit of her sweetheart should be flawless is perhaps a romanticised view of aphasia, owing something to the occasional dispensation from their symptoms enjoyed by Parkinsonian patients rather than stroke victims. Violet’s remark that if she could sing
everything then she wouldn’t forget, is more true of sufferers from Parkinson’s than it is of those incapacitated by a stroke, Parkinsonians sometimes being able to dance through a door when they are incapable of walking through it.
The press are several times unkindly noticed though not, I think, unfairly. Having on several occasions had to put up with their intrusions myself, I find I now make no distinction between reporters from the
Daily Mail
or journalists from the
Guardian:
they are more like each other than they are ordinary human beings.
Though neither the
Mail
nor the
Guardian
is a Murdoch paper, Murdoch is certainly to blame for pushing down standards not merely, as Dennis Potter said in his final interview, in journalism but in politics too and other areas of the nation’s life. The danger with Mr Murdoch is that he has been around now for long enough to have mellowed into a familiar villain whose unscrupulous behaviour no longer surprises; because he is so routinely self-seeking we have begun to take it with a shrug if not a smile. So it would have been with Hitler had he lived,
Desert Island Discs
the English reward for a long life, however ill-spent.
I note the absence of children. Nearly all these women are childless, only ninety-five-year-old Violet having a son but whom she doesn’t recognise as such because, with his ‘big wristwatch, attaché case and one of those green raincoaty-things they shoot in’, he looks more like a father than a son. No one else has children, not even in Australia where I’ve sometimes posted inconvenient offspring much as they did in the nineteenth century. I suppose I feel that children blur the picture and mitigate the sadness and, bringing their own problems with them, they demand to be attended to, and want to put their spoke in and are every bit as awkward in the drama as they are in life but with none of the compensations. One thing at a time is my motto and keep children out of it.
There’s no sense in Wilfred having a child in
Playing Sandwiches
because the audience would just be waiting for him to interfere with it. Miss Fozzard is unmarried and past child-bearing anyway: I suspect, though, she wouldn’t care for children particularly in the context of soft furnishings. Nor would Celia, the owner of the antique shop in
The Hand of God.
With her philosophy of,
‘Lovely to look at, nice to hold,
but if you break it I say Sold!’
she wouldn’t want small hands picking up her bibelots. I was once in an antique shop which a (not very unruly) child had just left. ‘No,’ said the
woman behind the counter, ‘I don’t care for children, and that was a particularly bad example of the genre.’
On the other hand a child might have helped both Marjory in
The Outside Dog and Rosemary in Nights in the Gardens of Spain
, taking Marjory’s mind off housework and Rosemary’s off the garden. But it would also have meant there would have been no story to tell.
Another omission is, of course, the television set, which one would expect to be chattering away in the corner of many of these rooms but which must invariably be censored by playwrights protective of their dialogue. These are not naturalistic pieces but even plays that claim to be faithful accounts of ordinary life can seldom accommodate this garrulous intruder. The world of everything that is the case is not the world of drama.
Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet
is my second stab at chiropody, the first being
A Private Function
in 1985. I have no idea why chiropodists should strike such a chord, though when my mother was getting on and I had to sit in on a visit by the local chiropodist the situation did feel quite comic. Bernard’s reference to ‘your foot feller’ is taken from another visit by the same chiropodist: finding my parents out, he left the time of their appointment with a neighbour, who, unable to spell chiropodist, put a note through the door saying, ‘Foot Feller, Tuesday 3.30’. Finding the note my father claimed he thought it was a racing tip.
Feet did figure in my childhood as one of my aunties worked in Manfield’s shoe shop on Commercial Street in Leeds and when she came round to see us in the evening she would regale us with all the events of her day, told in Proustian detail. When the door eventually closed behind her Dad would burst out, ‘I wouldn’t care but you’re no further on when she’s done.’
The names of shoes, the ‘fur-lined Gibson bruised look’ which Mr Dunderdale has Miss Fozzard try on, comes from twenty years ago when I was filming in an old-fashioned shoe shop in West Hartlepool. Feeling this was what proper writers did I took down a selection of names of shoes from the boxes stacked on the high shelves. I am sure the ankle-hugging bootee in Bengal bronze that Mr Dunderdale gives to Miss Fozzard is not a ‘fur-lined Gibson bruised look’ and I suppose I could verify this by walking down the road to Camden High Street where, to the detriment of the street as a decent shopping centre, every other shop is a shoe shop. But perhaps not, the expertise of the assistants in Camden stretching to the knowledge that shoes go on the feet but not much beyond that.
The department store where Miss Fozzard presides over Soft Furnishings is called Matthias Robinson’s, which was indeed a department store on Briggate in Leeds and which closed early in the sixties. The name itself is sufficient to stamp it as an old-fashioned emporium of which there were many in Leeds: Wheatley and Whiteley, Marsh Jones and Cribb, Marshall and Snelgrove and in Bradford, memorably Brown Muff’s. Marshall and Snelgrove was a smarter store than Matthias Robinson’s but both had the same hushed, carpeted elegance, soft lighting and snooty assistants (like Miss Fozzard) who called my mother ‘madam’ and so got her all flustered. Near where Matthias Robinson’s stood is now Harvey Nichols which aspires, I suppose, to be the smartest store in Leeds though nowhere quite captures the elegance of those grander stores or their seductive smell, a blend of perfume, leather, warm carpet and (in Bradford particularly) fur coats.

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