Untold Stories (53 page)

The Seventh Veil
was subsequently adapted for the stage and I still have the programme of the matinee I saw at the Grand Theatre in Leeds in March 1951. The Grieg Concerto had by this time been replaced by
Rachmaninov Number Two and James Mason by Leo Genn, but it was still Ann Todd, her guardian as ever bringing his stick down across her fingers as she cowered at the keyboard.

If Miss Shepherd had ever made it to the concert circuit this would be when I might have seen her, as I was by now going every week to symphony concerts in Leeds Town Hall where Miss Shepherd would have taken her place alongside Daphne Spottiswoode or Phyllis Sellick, Moura Lympany, Valda Aveling and Gina Bachauer – artistes with their décolleté, shawl-collared gowns as glamorous and imposing in my fourteen-year-old eyes as fashion models, Barbara Goalens of the keyboard, brought to their feet by the conductor to acknowledge the applause then sinking in a curtsy to receive the obligatory flowers just as, in memory anyway, Miss Shepherd does in the play.

When I wrote the original account I glossed over the fact that Miss Shepherd's death occurred the same night that, washed and in clean things, she returned from the day centre. I chose not to make this plain because for Miss Shepherd to die then seemed so handy and convenient, just when a writer would (if a little obviously) have chosen for her to die. So I note that I was nervous not only of altering the facts to suit the drama but of even seeming to have altered them. But that night or in the early hours of the morning was when she did die, the nurse who took her to the day centre (who wasn't the social worker) saying that she had come across several cases when someone who had lived rough had seemed somehow to know that death was imminent and had made preparations accordingly, in Miss Shepherd's case not merely seeing that she was washed and made more presentable but the previous week struggling to confession and Mass.

A year or so earlier when Miss Shepherd had been ill I'd tried to get some help from what remained of the convent at the top of the street. I got nowhere but the visit confirmed me in my low opinion of nuns, or this particular order anyway. Another cut:

I make no apology for the fact that Miss Shepherd makes great play with place names: St Albans, Bodmin, Hounslow, Staines. Since the oddity of place names is a staple of English comedy I might be accused of introducing Dunstable, say, for an easy laugh. I was once taken to task by a critic for using Burgess Hill in a play, a name devoid of comic overtones for me but thought by the critic to be a sure indicator of my triviality of mind. I'd actually just been hard put to think of a place and asked the actor who had the line (it was Valentine Dyall) where he lived, hence Burgess Hill. But with Miss Shepherd the extended landscape of places she had known was very real to this now largely stationary wanderer and they were still vivid in her mind as the objects of journeys she was always planning (and sometimes threatening) to make.

When our paths first crossed in the late sixties there was much less dereliction on the streets of London than there is today. Camden Town had its resident company of tramps and eccentrics, it's true, by no means all of them homeless or beggars, but they were as an aristocracy compared with the dozens of young poor and homeless that nowadays sleep in its doorways and beg on its streets. Several of these ancient archetypal figures were long-time residents of Arlington House, among the last of the Rowton Houses that provided cheap accommodation for working men in London, the one in Camden Town still happily functioning today. Now
adays, though, the windows of its individual cubicles look across to spacious executive apartments and over the restaurants, clubs and all the tawdry chaos of Camden Lock, which to my mind is far more offensive and destructive of the area than the beggars have ever been.

Another speech cut from the play:

Miss Shepherd, though, never thought of herself as a tramp. As a potential prime minister, how could she?

After Miss Shepherd died in April 1989 I had no immediate plans to write about her or any idea of the kind of thing I wanted to write, but it was coming up to the tenth anniversary of the
London Review of Books
and I had promised Mary-Kay Wilmers that I would contribute something. So I put together an account of Miss Shepherd, using some of the material from my diaries and quoting from the pamphlets of hers that I had saved
or rescued from the van. After this account had been published I had one or two stabs at turning it into a play but without success. Miss Shepherd's story was not difficult to tell; it was my own story over the same period that defeated me. Not that there was a great deal to be said, but somehow the two stories had to interconnect. It was only when I had the notion of splitting myself into two that the problem seemed to solve itself.

Still, very little of my own life is revealed, too little for one of the Alan Bennetts who, having brought the play to a conclusion, breaks back to speak directly to the audience (a function he's previously left to his partner):

The device of having two actors playing me isn't just a bit of theatrical showing off and does, however crudely, correspond to the reality. There was one bit of me (often irritated and resentful) that had to deal with this unwelcome guest camped literally on my doorstep, but there was another bit of me that was amused by how cross this eccentric lodger made me and that took pleasure in Miss Shepherd's absurdities and her outrageous demands.

There is no satisfactory way of dubbing these two parts (I would not call them halves) of my personality, and even if ‘the writer' would do for one, what is the other? The person? The householder? Or (a phrase from the courts) ‘the responsible adult'? As I wrote them first they were like an old married couple, complaining and finding fault with one another, nothing one thought or said a surprise to the other. I then started to find more fun in their relationship, made it teasing and even flirtatious, a line that the actors Nicholas Farrell and Kevin McNally made more of in rehearsal.

Alan Bennett the author then became definitely more mischievous, more amoral, than the Alan Bennett who goes out dutifully in his Marigold gloves in order to scoop his unsavoury lodger's poop, so that in some sense the division between them illustrates Kafka's remark that to
write is to do the devil's work. Of course Kafka doesn't imply the converse, that scooping the poop (or fetching Miss Shepherd her sherbet lemons) is God's work. I never felt it so and resented neighbours or well-wishers who cast me in the saintly role, preferring to be thought of as a fool. Still, there was no way of ducking these attributions of goodness, as the more I rebutted them the more selfless I seemed. ‘Kind is so tame,' says Kevin McNally in the play, and that at least comes from the heart.

In one particular instance, I wish the part of me Kevin McNally plays had in life been more venturesome. The cheap commercialisation of Camden High Street was just getting into its stride in 1989 when Miss Shepherd died but it was already far enough advanced for fliers about new boutiques and cafés to be put regularly through my door. At that time I let slip several opportunities that someone of a more mischievous temper than mine might well have taken up. Being on the electoral roll, Miss Shepherd was sent as many circulars as I was, including several from restaurants offering a free dinner (generally candlelit) to potential customers. I didn't avail myself of any of these offers but I regret now that I didn't pass on her vouchers to Miss Shepherd, as I would quite like to have seen the scene in such a restaurant with Miss Shepherd scowling and slurping (and smelling), surrounded by the appalled residents of Primrose Hill.

We were fortunate with the play to have a long rehearsal period (five and a half weeks) plus two weeks of previews, a time in which the anticipated difficulties of getting the van onto the stage and hoisting it off could be dealt with. In the event there were few problems with the van or the Robin Reliant, which also does a tour of the stage. What took up the time was the text, in particular the presentation of the two selves. Should they be dressed alike, for instance, in sports coat, M&S corduroys, suede shoes, the clothes I like to think I just happened to be wearing when the designer, Mark Thompson, paid me a visit, but near enough, I suppose, to what I wear every day? But are these the proper garments of my inner voice? Should the other self be put into something more sophisticated and metropolitan, black trousers, perhaps, a black polo neck?

In the end we decided that would be simplistic and so the two selves were dressed alike, and though this means that some of the audience are a bit slow to understand what is going on, it is probably better and sillier (which I like) to make them Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They were luckier than Maggie Smith, who as Miss Shepherd had to deck herself out in a variety of outfits, many of them quick changes, which had to be achieved in the cramped interior of the van.

Over the years Miss Shepherd had four or five vans, of which in the stage production we see two: the one (donated by Lady Wiggin) which she drives onto the stage halfway through the first act, and another, supposedly the same, on which the curtain rises for Act Two, but since this is several years later now transformed by Miss Shepherd's usual coat of scrambled egg or badly made custard. Miss Shepherd's fascination with any aid to locomotion meant that she over-supplied herself not only with vans but even with walking sticks, of which she had many, one of which Maggie Smith uses in the play. It still bears traces of Miss Shepherd's characteristic yellow paint, evidence of her last painting job done on the three-wheeler which she parked outside my gate, where (another relic) the kerb still shows a few tell-tale yellow spots.

The three-wheeler had a predecessor, a battered Mini, but this was stolen only a month or two after Miss Shepherd acquired it and was later found abandoned in the basement of the council flats in Maiden Lane near King's Cross. Like the Reliant, its chief function had been as a supplementary wardrobe and it was thus heavily pervaded by Miss Shepherd's characteristic odour. I felt slightly sorry for the thieves (who were never, of course, caught), imagining them making off with the vehicle and only as they sped illicitly through Camden Town being hit by the awfulness of what it contained, this realisation signalled by expressions of vernacular fastidiousness such as ‘Do me a favour!', ‘Cor, strike a light!' or, as the scent took hold, ‘Jesus wept!' So that when, having gone to Maiden Lane to recover some of her papers from the car, I found it bearing a Police Aware notice, I felt that it had, in this case, a heightened significance.