House Arrest

Alan Bennett

Profile, £6.99

AS ONE who imbues the drearily banal with a witty, eloquent radiance, the diaries of the inimitable Alan Bennett are always highly anticipated. This latest volume covers the pandemic, opening on 24 February 2020 with the earliest hints that a lockdown might be on the cards. And what difference does it make to our most treasured playwright? To begin with, not much.

“As an over-seventy, I am officially exhorted to remain isolated and indoors which is to say that my usual going-on now has governmental endorsement,” he observes, drily. At 86, the “increasingly medicated” Bennett’s mobility is already restricted by arthritis, and he has had to give up his beloved bike. “Static semi-isolation is scarcely a hardship or even a disruption of my routine.”

The most noticeable difference is that, with his partner Rupert now working from home, he benefits from “regular cups of tea and a lovely hot lunch”. But by July the lockdown is having an effect even on a habitual hermit like Bennett. During a phone call to the optician, he finds words failing him and has to get Rupert to take over.

His only reference point for this “medical scourge” is TB, bringing to mind his mother’s anxiety when their next-door neighbours in Leeds lost a father and son to the disease. Even after TB was eradicated, it had left an impression on her that lasted to her dying day, as Covid no doubt will to us. Not for the first time, Alan Bennett’s mum gives us a glimpse of our own futures.

As well as giving him cause to express his gratitude for the NHS and his anger towards Boris Johnson, the pandemic brings sadness: the closure of a favourite bookshop whose religious owner blacklisted Moby-Dick on principle; the death of a lifelong friend who, because of lockdown regulations, won’t get the funeral he deserves. Bennett recounts an embarrassing moment when, on his evening walk, he encounters people clapping and pan-banging outside their front doors and inadvertently gives the impression that he thinks the applause is for him rather than the NHS. But, as a man already living an isolated life, the pandemic has not, on the whole, been a great source of anecdotal material.

He’s much more inspired when he reads or sees things which jog old memories. A mention of the Yorkshire village of Ulleskelf brings his family’s fishing expeditions in the early 1940s flooding back. He remembers his dad’s crazes, such as “turning out toys which he sold for a few much-needed pounds down County Arcade in Leeds” or his home-made non-alcoholic but highly explosive herb beer. These passages are vivid and evocative in the way we’ve come to expect from him.

The disappointing thing about House Arrest, really, is its brevity. Even at the low hardback price of £6.99, 44 pages of text doesn’t seem like a great deal. Since it covers the period when his Talking Heads was remade for television, this would have been a welcome opportunity to see how Bennett’s views of his own plays has changed since their original 1988 production, and how they chimed with the directors’ views of re-staging them, but that’s not in this book’s remit. He does, however, sweetly describe carrying A Chip in the Sugar star Martin Freeman’s thank-you card around with him “like a hand-warmer”.

It is quite thin, and Bennett seems to realise this himself, filling it out with a slightly apologetic coda of a trip back home to Leeds in the autumn of 2021, which by Bennett’s standards, has the air of the perfunctory.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT