Beyond the Schoolboy Fringe - Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett is something of a pot pourri. It starts with an autobiographical exploration of social and family origins, and then moves on to include occasional pieces on travel, architecture and art, copious diaries from 1996 to 2004, reflections on previous and current work and essays on contemporaries, educational experience and culture. The fact that it all hangs together beautifully is a result of its author’s consummate skills, both linguistic and perceptive.

Untold Stories takes its title from the autobiographical sketch that opens the book. Alan Bennett was the physically late-developing child of a family in the Armley district of Leeds, a northern English industrial city. His father was a butcher who owned two suits, both of which smelled of raw meat. His mother was the supporting pillar of the household, but was also prone to bouts of depression. As a child, Alan Bennett seemed to dream less than most. Perhaps he is still less than able to admit the breadth of his flights of fancy.

“With a writer the life you don’t have is as ample a country as the life you do and is sometimes easier to access.” This sounds remarkably like e e cummings, a character that would not usually be linked with someone as apparently domesticated as Alan Bennett. But reading all of Untold Stories, the reader is repeatedly struck by how much of the eventual content of Alan Bennett’s perceptive, witty and perspicacious writings has its origins within the four walls of the family home. Many of the values, assumptions, attitudes and standpoints, whose apparently unquestioning adoption by his fictional characters lead the listener to question them, arose from a wider family that feverishly tried to be mundane but, like all families, never achieved that goal. The family was, after all, made up of individuals, each of which had his or her own reality alongside unresolved and often shared misgivings. 

Thus, immediately, a writer has several lifetimes of real and imagined material. Alan Bennett, perhaps by virtue of having at least potentially crossed some of the chasms of social class that so profoundly divide British society, seems able to comment, often with no more than an occasional word or phrase, on those tentative but agreed assumptions that make us what we are. “Minor writers often convey a more intense flavour of their times than those whose range is broader and concerns more profound.”

But this, despite the authenticity of his flavours, is no minor writer. Not for a moment would anyone wish this writer’s passing, but there is no doubt that Alan Bennett’s work will live on, probably grow in stature as its ability to comment on the changing Britain of the twentieth century develops a sharper focus.

Essentially Alan Bennett comes across as a conservative type. He dresses and even looks like a 1950s schoolboy, visits churches to describe architectural details of selected tombs in Betjemanesque prose, probably doesn’t indulge in fusion cooking, shuns recognition, inhabits the inner city but is perhaps never quite at home there. But then there’s the anti-establishment side, the satirist, the overt homosexuality and general anti-bigwig mentality. 

And all of this from a First at Oxford. “But taste is no help to a writer. Taste is timorous, conservative and fearful. It is a handicap. Olivier was unhampered by taste and was often vulgar. Dickens similarly. Both could fail, and failure is a sort of vulgarity, but it’s better than a timorous toeing of the line.” Untold Stories is a long read, but one which offers a simple yet sophisticated joy from beginning to end. Alan Bennett revisits topics he has written about in the past. Miss Shepherd, The Lady In The Van is here, as are his early plays and Beyond The Fringe. So are Talking Heads and The History Boys. But throughout he selects and applies language with much wit and humour to offer apparently ephemeral perspectives on everyday life, perspectives that on reflection are anything but shallow. He is a man of taste, as revealed by his regular revulsion with Classic FM, but he is also an enigma because he keeps listening to it.

My new life as a ghost - 50 of the best by Martin Offiah

Becoming a ghost usually involves major change in one’s life. It doesn’t happen every day. For me the call came in May 2009. A name I recognised appeared in the subject line of an email from a friend. I thought it might be a joke. The more momentous the event, it seems, the more one is tempted to see it lightly, to discount it as unlikely. It’s a form of self-preservation, I suppose. So when I opened the message to find it contained a serious suggestion, I was surprised, to say the least. 

The name in question was that of Martin Offiah. He’s a former rugby league player who has become a bit of a celeb. Actually, describing Martin Offiah as a former rugby league player is about as apposite as saying that Ringo Starr used to be a drummer in a rock band. When he retired, Martin had scored 501 tries in the game, making him the third most prolific scorer in the game’s history. The two above him, Brian Bevan and Billy Boston, played in a different era, that of the 1950s and 1960s.

The game has changed since then. I know because I saw both of them play when I was kid in the West Riding of Yorkshire and a near-permanent feature of Wakefeild Trinity’s Belle Vue home. I am even in the greatest ever film about rugby league. The film, of course, was Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life. It was nominated for two Oscars and provided Richard Harris with his first starring role. Now if you look really carefully, I am the lad in short trousers behind the sticks at the Belle Vue end in one of the crowd sequences. I, along with more than 28000 others, witnessed as extras the filming of some of the play sequences as a curtain raiser to the 1962 third round Rugby League Challenge Cup tie between Wakefield and Wigan. Wakefield won 5-4. Fred Smith scored the game’s only try, diving in at the corner on the Trinity right. Neil Fox missed the conversion, but kicked a penalty in the game. Wigan’s fullback, Griffiths, kicked two penalties. Tries were only three points in those days, by the way.

To be asked to write a book with Martin Offiah was for me the stuff of dreams, even at the age of 57! I have not kept up my passion for rugby league because in 1970 I moved to London and in 1992 I left Britain altogether. Rugby league is hard to connect with from afar. It’s easier now that the internet brings the far to just a click away. The suggestion was that Martin, the consummate try-scorer, should select and describe fifty of the greatest tries ever scored in the game. It was a project at appealed to me, both because of my lifetime interest in the game and because here was a chance to become a ghost and perhaps, just perhaps, invent a new me. Martin and I communicated by phone. I live in Spain and he’s in London. We talked on Skype and I recorded our conversations using shareware that creates mp3 files that can be played a replayed through Realplayer. The 66000 word book appeared from this ether by the end of August and, a few weeks later, there was a website with videos of all the action Martin chose to describe. Have a look at martinoffiah.co.uk and do please read his 50 Of The Best. Imagine the process that produced it. And now, officially, I can call myself a ghost.

View this book on amazon 50 of the Best: Fifty of the Greatest Rugby League Tries of All Time