people made more of their lives than we did’. Even the Second World War brought no drama into their existence. Mr Bennett was in a reserved occupation and therefore not conscripted; he served as an air-raid warden, but among British industrial cities Leeds suffered relatively little bombing and his duties were light. ‘War, peace, it makes no difference, our family never quite joining in, let alone joining up, and the camaraderie passes us by as camaraderie generally did.’ Entertainment consisted of listening to the radio, and a twice-weekly visit to the local cinema, whatever was showing; on other evenings his parents retired at nine o’clock to bed, where the schoolboy Alan brought them a cup of tea on returning from his customary solitary walk to the public library.
Mrs Bennett had two sisters, Kathleen and Myra, who were more extrovert, and brought some noise and excitement into the muted Bennett household, though generally to the parents’ displeasure and disapproval. Myra used the war to escape the drab confines of Leeds, joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and married an RAF serviceman in India. When her husband died Alan witnessed her ill-advised attempt to scatter his ashes on Ilkley Moor on a windy day, remarking ‘He didn’t want to leave me’, as she dusted herself down afterwards. The older sister Kathleen, the dominating and loquacious manageress of a shoe shop, surprised everybody by marrying late in life. But she too was widowed, and succumbed to dementia, which ‘unleashes torrents of speech, monologues of continuous anecdote and dizzying complexity, one train of thought switching to another without signal or pause, rattling across points and through junctions at a rate no listener can follow’. Kathleen ends her days in the same mental hospital to which her sister was originally admitted, goes missing and is found in wasteland nearby – dramatically by Alan Bennett himself – dead from exposure.
A dark thread runs through the family history on Bennett’s mother’s side. After she was admitted to the mental hospital for the first time, his father revealed that her father, Alan’s grandfather, committed suicide by drowning. Bennett admits that he was rather excited by this revelation. ‘It made my family more interesting . . . I had just begun to write but had already given up on my own background because the material seemed so thin.’ In fact much of his best work was to be distilled from the memory of what seemed at the time dull ordinary experience, and like most writers he suffers occasional qualms of conscience about exploiting his nearest and dearest in this way. Bennett’s uneasiness about his last encounter with his father (described above) was compounded by the circumstance that he had just written a television play, then in pre-production, about a man who has a heart attack on the beach at Morecambe, the same beach where Bennett’s own parents took their last walk together, making him feel that in some uncanny way he had caused his father’s death. Six years later he returned to the same emotional nexus, another TV play about a man who visits his father in intensive care to be with him when he dies, but is in bed with a nurse at the crucial moment.
Bennett has based several of his female characters on his mother and recalls a remark of hers, ‘By, you’ve had some script out of me!’ which obviously struck home. But typically he explored its implications creatively in a different context – the play he wrote about Miss Shepherd,
The Lady in the Van.
This was based on one of the more bizarre episodes in Alan Bennett’s life, when he allowed a crazed, filthy, smelly, aggressive, bigoted vagrant of genteel origins to live in an insanitary camper parked in the front garden of his London house for fifteen years. Why did he put up with her, and for so long? Altruistic compassion alone cannot explain it. Perhaps, as some lines in the play suggest, he was compensating for
Mrs Bennett had two sisters, Kathleen and Myra, who were more extrovert, and brought some noise and excitement into the muted Bennett household, though generally to the parents’ displeasure and disapproval. Myra used the war to escape the drab confines of Leeds, joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and married an RAF serviceman in India. When her husband died Alan witnessed her ill-advised attempt to scatter his ashes on Ilkley Moor on a windy day, remarking ‘He didn’t want to leave me’, as she dusted herself down afterwards. The older sister Kathleen, the dominating and loquacious manageress of a shoe shop, surprised everybody by marrying late in life. But she too was widowed, and succumbed to dementia, which ‘unleashes torrents of speech, monologues of continuous anecdote and dizzying complexity, one train of thought switching to another without signal or pause, rattling across points and through junctions at a rate no listener can follow’. Kathleen ends her days in the same mental hospital to which her sister was originally admitted, goes missing and is found in wasteland nearby – dramatically by Alan Bennett himself – dead from exposure.
A dark thread runs through the family history on Bennett’s mother’s side. After she was admitted to the mental hospital for the first time, his father revealed that her father, Alan’s grandfather, committed suicide by drowning. Bennett admits that he was rather excited by this revelation. ‘It made my family more interesting . . . I had just begun to write but had already given up on my own background because the material seemed so thin.’ In fact much of his best work was to be distilled from the memory of what seemed at the time dull ordinary experience, and like most writers he suffers occasional qualms of conscience about exploiting his nearest and dearest in this way. Bennett’s uneasiness about his last encounter with his father (described above) was compounded by the circumstance that he had just written a television play, then in pre-production, about a man who has a heart attack on the beach at Morecambe, the same beach where Bennett’s own parents took their last walk together, making him feel that in some uncanny way he had caused his father’s death. Six years later he returned to the same emotional nexus, another TV play about a man who visits his father in intensive care to be with him when he dies, but is in bed with a nurse at the crucial moment.
Bennett has based several of his female characters on his mother and recalls a remark of hers, ‘By, you’ve had some script out of me!’ which obviously struck home. But typically he explored its implications creatively in a different context – the play he wrote about Miss Shepherd,
The Lady in the Van.
This was based on one of the more bizarre episodes in Alan Bennett’s life, when he allowed a crazed, filthy, smelly, aggressive, bigoted vagrant of genteel origins to live in an insanitary camper parked in the front garden of his London house for fifteen years. Why did he put up with her, and for so long? Altruistic compassion alone cannot explain it. Perhaps, as some lines in the play suggest, he was compensating for
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