Untold Stories (52 page)

At first the heart sinks to find the nave has lost its pews and is now filled with blue upholstered conference chairs arranged in a tell-tale semicircle. That churches should show any interest in God at all always puts R. off but there's plenty here to outweigh any children's cornery, particularly the early seventeenth-century Tanfield tomb where the free-standing angels above the columns are perched on pediments that are in fact breasts (nipple downwards). The memorial tablet to Edmund Harman, Henry VIII's doctor, is even more extraordinary, with figures in relief which are among the first representations of Native Americans but which seem less of the sixteenth than the early twentieth century and could well be mistaken for sculptures by Eric Gill.

27
October
. We call at Stokesay Castle. It's an English Heritage property, as one might deduce from the sheet of paper torn from an exercise book and stuck on the gate of the car park: ‘Closed today and tomorrow'. It's exactly the same at a later stopping point, English Heritage's Haughmond Abbey, only this time the torn sheet of paper reads: ‘Closed till next April'. English Heritage curators are an eccentric lot, which I don't mind except that they seem to open and close their properties on a whim, ‘Well, it's half-term' the probable excuse.

Still there are compensations, as denied access both to Stokesay Castle and Stokesay Church we wander round the graveyard and come upon the war memorial. It's of a soldier, solid and even squat, looking as much
French as English, and though it's strictly representational it has something of Vorticism about it, like a three-dimensional version of the figures that populate the paintings of William Roberts. There's a reluctance about the soldier, too, the heaviness of the figure more to do with resignation than any eager embracing of the military calling. One of my fellow conscripts in the army used to maintain that the pose of soldiers on war memorials only made sense if you thought of them as just having been caught skiving. And certainly this soldier hardly looks keen and definitely not noble. I've often wished there was a comprehensive study of war memorials even if it were only in the form of a register; they go largely unnoticed in guidebooks and I've never seen this stocky little squaddy reproduced. It's anonymous, too, with what seems like the name of the sculptor carved on the side of the plinth more probably an overflow from the list of the dead that fills the front.
*

8
November
. Sitting in the barber's chair this afternoon I wonder whether there were barbers in Auschwitz, Jews who were put aside before being killed to cut the hair not of the other Jews but of the officers and guards, and what such a barber's might have been like. One could see a film opening like this, a man in the chair covered by a sheet while a thin, nervous barber puts the finishing touches to his hair, holds up the mirror, dusts the back of his neck, then takes the sheet off to reveal someone in SS uniform.

These thoughts are occasioned by my barber, who is Moroccan or Algerian, not Jewish, but is thin and delicate and quite nervous, too, but much to be preferred to his two colleagues because he has very little English and so does not expect me to talk.

Also in the barber's chair I think about Alec Guinness. I don't know where he had his hair cut but it was probably somewhere in Mayfair, Trumper's possibly, or wherever smart, upper-class men go these days. Knowing Alec I imagine there would be a large tip, over-tipping his way
of coping with his social unease. The tip would be so large and Alec so bald it would probably have been possible to put a price on each individual hair.

14
November
. Appropriately for Remembrance Day I am reading
Assault
Division
by Norman Scarfe, a history of the 3rd Division from D-Day to the surrender of Germany, first published in 1947 and here reissued (Spellmount,
£
20).

Norman, now eighty and our leading local historian, particularly of East Anglia, was at the time of writing not much more than a schoolboy. He'd spent a year at Oxford before he was called up and at twenty found himself a gunnery officer attached to the 3rd Division in the first wave of landings on D-Day, firing his guns as the incoming tide lapped around his boots. He stayed with the division all that last year of the war, then went back to Oxford, where he wrote this book in the intervals of doing undergraduate essays on medieval history.

Military history so soon after the war was more tight-lipped than it subsequently became but the young Scarfe's exuberance keeps breaking in and with his jokes and digs and exclamation marks he's like a new old boy writing back to his school magazine. It's a humbling book, though, and an inspiring one, some of it unbearable to read, particularly the action on the first few days: Sherman tanks up-ended in the waves, drowning their helpless crews, and the beach raked by machine-gun fire from the shabby seaside promenade. Who now would willingly walk into such a hail of bullets and without recrimination?

I've always thought acting and soldiering had much in common though I hadn't realised it ran to a common interest in the reviews. Some units (and whole armies) were persistently unsung, with journalists then as now incapable of the proper ascription of credit, opting for the showy (e.g. Lord Lovat's arrival with his piper) rather than the death-defying slog that preceded it. This youthful book is both magnanimous and fair but later histories and memoirs were not so understanding and there would be much hoovering up of credit, not least by Montgomery himself.

It was this second Second World War, the fighting as seen through the prism of the 1950s and the films and clichés that came with it, that we were satirising in
Beyond the Fringe
. By that time the understatement that comes naturally to Norman Scarfe and the earliest chroniclers had turned into a trope, a specious and self-deprecating gloss applied to the many movies made about the war, and which nowadays seem comic.

With death everywhere this dry, factual book brings back the reality, as Remembrance Day and its attendant commemorations never entirely do, the sentiments attaching to these solemnities enlisted in whatever conflict we're engaged in. This year both Blair and the fox-hunters are keen to dabble us in the long-spilled blood. ‘This was the freedom they died for.' No, it wasn't.

15
December
. Handy hints: a garage I go to occasionally in Ilkley has a box of coppers by the till. If you're short of a penny or two you take some from the box and, though there's no obligation, if you get the odd penny in change you put it back. I am as happy getting rid of the odd penny as taking one since the end result is the same, reducing the amount of copper in one's pocket. With many bottles of unused coppers at home I wish this practice was more widespread.

Apropos shopping, I note that this year Sainsbury's profits have fallen. I have played a small part in this as I am increasingly reluctant to visit their Camden Town store, a grey, dingy steel and glass structure designed by Nicholas Grimshaw, who, in order to make room for his little bit of Danzig, demolished a pleasing and easily convertible Art Deco bakery that was previously on the site. Visiting the store has always been lowering to the spirit, though alleviated somewhat by an old-fashioned flower stall outside the back door, kept by a mother and daughter and where one could always buy posies of anemones. It persisted for some years until Sainsbury's itself decided to sell flowers (though not anemones), the mother and daughter lost their pitch, I lost any incentive to shop there and Sainsbury's profits fell accordingly. Did I know about economics, all this could probably be expressed in the form of an equation.

16
December
. As I'm correcting the proofs of this diary the news comes of David Blunkett's resignation. It's hard not to welcome his departure, while at the same time deploring the manner of it: anyone hounded by the newspapers has my sympathy, even though in Blunkett's case the leaders of the pack were the very papers he had courted. Scarcely has he cleared his desk when the judges in the Lords condemn the indefinite detention of foreign nationals as unlawful, a judgement which, it's to be hoped, signals some sort of turning of the tide. Santa may call at Belmarsh if not at Guantánamo Bay.

After Miss Shepherd drove her van into my garden in 1974 friends used to ask me if I was planning to write a play about her. I wasn't, but twenty-five years later I have. There are plenty of reasons for the time lag, the most obvious being that it would have been very difficult to write about her when she was alive and, as it were, on site.

‘How can I write about her?' says one of the Alan Bennetts in the play. ‘She's
there
.' And although the line was later cut it remains true.

Miss Shepherd's presence in the garden didn't, of course, stop me jotting things down, making notes on her activities and chronicling her various comic encounters. Indeed, in my bleaker moments it sometimes seemed that this was all there was to note down since nothing else was happening to me, hence, I suppose, the plaintive denials that make up the last speech in the play.

Still, there was no question of writing or publishing anything about her until she was dead or gone from the garden, and as time passed the two came to seem the same thing. Occasionally newspapers took an interest and tried to blow the situation up into a jolly news item, but again, as is said in the play, the ramparts of privacy were more impregnable in those pre-Murdoch days and she was generally left to herself. Even journalists who came to interview me were often too polite to ask what an (increasingly whiffy) old van was doing parked a few feet from my door. If they did enquire I would explain, while asking them to keep it to themselves, which they invariably did. I can't think that these days there would be similar discretion.

Miss Shepherd helped, of course, lying low if anybody came to my door, and at night straight away switching off her light whenever she heard a footstep. But though she was undoubtedly a recluse (‘Is she', a neighbour once asked, ‘a genuine eccentric?'), Miss Shepherd was not averse to the occasional bout of celebrity. I came back one day to find her posing beside the van for a woman columnist (gender did count with Miss S.) who had somehow sweet-talked her into giving an interview, Miss Shepherd managing in the process to imply that I had over the years systematically stifled her voice. If she has since achieved any fame or notoriety through my having written about her, I suspect that she would think it no more than her due and that her position as writer of pamphlets and political commentator entitled her to public recognition or, as she says in the play, ‘the freedom of the land'.

It was this imaginary celebrity – I think the psychological term for it is ‘delusion of reference' – that made her assume with every IRA bomb that she was next on the list. A disastrous fire in the Isle of Man meant, she was certain, that the culprit would now target her, and had she been alive at the time of Princess Diana's death she would have taken it as a personal warning to avoid travelling (in the van as distinct from a high-powered Mercedes) under the Pont d' Alma. In the first (and much longer) draft of the play this obsession was examined in more detail:

It's said of Robert Lowell that when he regularly went off his head it took the form of thinking he could rub shoulders with Beethoven, Voltaire and other all-time greats, with whom he considered himself to be on equal terms. (Actually Isaiah Berlin, about whose sanity there was no doubt, made exactly the same assumption, but that's by the way.) The Virgin Mary excepted, Miss Shepherd's sights were set rather lower. Her assumed equals were Harold Wilson, Mr Heath and (as she always called him) ‘Enoch' and I was constantly being badgered to find out their private addresses so that they could be sent the latest copy of
True View
. Atypically for someone unbalanced, Miss Shepherd never seemed to take much interest in the Royal Family, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh never thought of as potential readers. This did not mean, though, that she was a disloyal subject and on the occasion of the Queen's Jubilee in 1977 there was only one flag to be seen in our well-to-do socialist street and that was in the back window of the van where only I could see it.

To begin with I wrote the play in three acts, knowing, though, that these days this is not a popular format. Still, that's how Miss Shepherd's story seemed to present itself, the first act consisting of her life in the street and culminating with her driving the van into the garden; the second act was life in the garden (all fifteen years of it); and the third act the events leading to her death and departure. The trouble with this way of telling the story was that whereas there was movement built into the first act (the lead-up to her arrival) and movement in the third (her decline and
death), Act Two simply consisted of her being there, parked in the garden and going nowhere, the only movement me occasionally going up the wall.

A second draft condensed the material into two acts, and though the passage of time within the play was perhaps not as clear, the passage of time within the theatre was altogether more acceptable, an hour each way quite enough for me. As Churchill said, the mind cannot take in more than the seat will endure.

Telling the truth crops up quite a bit in the play, what Miss Shepherd did or didn't do a subject of some disagreement between ‘the boys', as I tended to think of the two Alan Bennetts. They call not telling the truth ‘lying', but ‘the imagination' would be a kinder way of putting it, with Alan Bennett the writer finally winning through to make Miss Shepherd talk of her past (as she never actually did) and even to bring her back from the dead in order to take her bodily up to heaven (also imaginary).

These departures from the facts were genuinely hard won and took some coming to, causing me to reflect, not for the first time, that the biggest handicap for a writer is to have had a decent upbringing. Brought up not to lie or show off, I was temperamentally inclined to do both, particularly as a small child, and though reining me in perhaps improved my character, it was no help in my future profession where lying, or romancing anyway, is the essence of it.

Nor did my education help. One of the difficulties I had in writing
The
Madness of George III
was that, having been educated as a historian, I found it hard ever to take leave of the facts. With George III's first bout of madness the facts needed scarcely any alteration to make them dramatic and only a little tweaking was required, but even that I found hard to do. It was still harder to play around with the facts of Miss Shepherd's life, although the only person to know how much I may have doctored her history is me. And actually, while I've obviously had to compress a good deal, I haven't had to alter much at all. It's true, though, that a lengthier account of the events leading up to her moving into the garden with the van would make this development less dramatic, and less of a turning point.

What happened was that one night several of the van's windows were broken by two drunks, an incident that occurs in the play. This meant that Miss Shepherd was now much more at the mercy of the elements, the faded cretonne curtains which covered one or two of the windows her only protection from the weather and from prying eyes. I had a lean-to down some steps at the side of my house and now ran an electric lead out to this hut, so that on cold nights she could go in there to keep warm. Inevitably she began to spend the night there on a regular basis, the van becoming part office, part wardrobe, a repository for her pamphlets and her clothes and the place where she would spend what she saw as her working day.

As I write I see Michael Frayn walking up the street en route from his home to his office nearby, where he writes. Miss Shepherd's routine was not very different, in this instance as in others mentioned in the play her life not as dissimilar from that of her neighbours as they would have liked to think. They had offices to go to and so did she. They had second homes and, having acquired a Robin Reliant, so did she, a parallel which Miss Ferris, the irritatingly patient (and somewhat jargon-ridden) social worker in the play, is not slow to point out. But with Miss Shepherd going to and from her sleeping quarters in the hut to her office in the van it meant that I got used to her crossing the garden in front of my window, so that when she did finally move in, bags and all, it was neither the surprise nor the life-changing decision (for both of us) that the play perhaps implies.

Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers, so Miss Ferris is a composite figure. To begin with the social workers got short shrift, their only function in Miss Shepherd's view to procure her concessions from the council: another walking stick, an additional wheelchair ‘in case this one conks out, possibly' and (a dream she never attained) the electrified chair in which she saw herself moving regally through the streets of Camden Town.

A composite, too, are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin
Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth's. Married to the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, he regarded Miss Shepherd with a sceptical eye, never moderating his (not unpenetrating) voice when he was discussing her, though she might well be in the van only a few feet away. He, I'm sure, thought I was mad to let her stay. Still, he came to her funeral and as the coffin was slid into the hearse he remarked loudly as ever, ‘Well, it's a cut above her previous vehicle.'

Like Rufus in the play, Colin had little time for feminism. I once asked him if he was jealous of his wife's literary success. ‘Good God, no. One couldn't be jealous of a woman, surely?'

Though the character of Underwood is a fiction, invented in order to hint at something unexplained in Miss Shepherd's past (and ultimately to explain it), he had, certainly as regards his appearance, a basis in fact. When the van was still parked in the street the late Nicholas Tomalin and I had been mobilised by Miss Shepherd to push it forward a few yards to a fresh location. I wrote in my diary:

For all the doubts I voice about tramps in the play, when one comes across such a fugitive from
Godot
it's hard not to think that Beckett's role as social observer has been underestimated.

I have allowed myself a little leeway in speculating about Miss Shepherd's concert career, though if, as her brother said, she had studied with Cortot she must have been a pianist of some ability. Cortot was the leading French pianist between the wars, Miss Shepherd presumably studying with him at the height of his fame. Continuing to give concerts
throughout the Occupation, he finished the war under a cloud and it was perhaps this that sent him on a concert tour to England, where I remember seeing his photograph on posters sometime in the late forties. Perhaps Miss Shepherd saw it too, though by this time her hopes of a concert career must have been fading, a vocation as a nun already her goal.

Her war had been spent driving ambulances, a job for which she had presumably enlisted and been trained and which marked the beginning of her lifelong fascination with anything on wheels. Comically she figures in my mind alongside the Queen, who as Princess Elizabeth also did war service and as an ATS recruit was filmed in a famous piece of wartime propaganda changing the wheel on an army lorry, a vehicle my mother fondly believed HRH drove for the duration of hostilities.

What with land girls, nurses, WAAFs, the ATS and Wrens, these were years of cheerful, confident, seemingly carefree women and I'd like to think of Miss Shepherd as briefly one of them, having the time of her life: accompanying a singsong in the NAAFI perhaps, snatching a meal in a British restaurant, then going to the pictures to see Leslie Howard or Joan Fontaine. It was maybe this taste of wartime independence that later unsuited her for the veil, or it may be, as her brother suggested, that she suffered shellshock after a bomb exploded near her ambulance. At any rate she was invalided out and this was when her troubles began, with, in her brother's view, the call of the convent a part of it.

I would have liked her concert career to have outlasted the war or to have resumed after the duration, when the notion of a woman playing the piano against psychological odds was the theme of the film
The Seventh
Veil
(1945), with Ann Todd as the pianist Francesca and James Mason her tyrannical stick-wielding Svengali. Enormously popular at the time (and with it the Grieg Piano Concerto), the film set the tone for a generation of glamorous pianists, best known of whom was Eileen Joyce, who was reputed to change her frock between movements.