Gloucester Crescent

 If you've seen "The Lady in the Van" you know Gloucester Crescent a little bit; you have a little idea of the kind of people who live there - like the kind woman who tries to give Miss Shepherd some home baking, and the cross man (Roger Allam) who opens her jar, the children who play piercingly on the recorder and drive her nuts, and Alan Bennett himself. You know that the houses are tall and Victorian, possibly 😏, and have tiny little front gardens and large basement kitchens.

This seems to be a historical shot of the street, and Miss Shepherd's van, before they were famous.

If you read the Nina Stibbe book "Love Nina" you find that the family she was the nanny for - the Frears, and Mary-Kay Wilmer - lived opposite Alan Bennett. Jonathan Miller, with his wife and family, lived up the road, and they borrowed his saw to cut up a Christmas tree. Claire Tomalin, busily editing literary pages for a Sunday paper, and writing a biography possibly, lived close by, and with her a playwright called Michael Frayn. Mrs Ursula Vaughan Williams lived in the street, and later on, so does Debbie Moggach, another writer. Nina was absolutely thrilled by the comings and goings and the artiness of everyone in the street. She writes home to Leicester to tell everyone about it and she reports conversations verbatim, which makes her seem like a playwright herself. She spots the wit in people, and some of the ridiculousness of the young people she meets at the Poly, and the second time I read the book I laughed a lot. I think the first time I read it I thought - "oh, it starts to flag when Alan's off the scene", but that was just me. The writing has a free-wheeling personality all the way through.

Nina-the-nanny has to cook something for supper every evening, not just for Mary Kay (editor of the London Review of Books) and the boys, but for Alan Bennett as well, and some of her letters are concerned with the trials of cooking and asking her sister for more recipes. Alan is a bit critical of Hunter chicken, saying he prefers it without tinned tomatoes. He brings around milk puddings as his contributions. Sometimes I wondered if he ever went round to see Jonathan Miller, because in Nina's book they don't seem to be on speaking terms. Did they fall out after "Beyond the Fringe"? They must have done. Do they even nod at each other in the street for old times' sake? 

I was concerned about the non-relationship between Alan and Jonathan, and in the spirit of enquiry, I went to another book about Gloucester Crescent which is called "Gloucester Crescent" by William Miller, son of the famous Jonathan.  This popped up on my Amazon feed. So I went for the Kindle version. (I am now deploying this strategy with book-buying: If I want it on my bookshelf I buy the book but if I think of the book as a mere diversion, e.g. a thriller, I get it on Kindle. If it's for my research it's nearly always out of print and I have to get a second-hand version on Amazon. 

So, "Gloucester Crescent" is written by an almost exact contemporary of mine. Whereas I was growing up in the stockbroker belt he was right in the middle of London. His sort of people were the sorts that appeared in the Sunday Paper Magazine. (A Life in the Day of). He writes in a terrible plonking style because he is a small child to start with, and this reflects a small child's sensibility, but it carries on like that. The vocabulary gets better as he gets older. He never really gives you a taste of the fun that must have gone on at his father's dining table, but he does tell you...

That Alan Bennett came round to dinner every night. Every night. And brought milk puddings.  And brunch on Sundays. You can understand how perplexed I am. At no point does Alan seem to stop going to the Millers' and start to go to Mary-Kay's. Did he eat two dinners every evening, and if so why? did he not put on weight? 

What comes across very strongly is William's father's personality and his father's strong opinions. These reject the idea of perpetuating class - the class system. Jonathan went to a public school and onto Cambridge, and spoke with an incredibly posh accent. At Cambridge, he was able to meet a large number of young men and a small number of women just like himself. He could see that the public school system was very wrong and divisive so he decided to send his own children to the local state schools. This is fine when the children are small, and get help at home, but later on his children, especially William, suffered from being with very threatening bullies, and could have achieved a lot more than they did, we infer, if the classrooms not been merry hell. The freedoms that the children enjoyed when they ran around to each other's houses reminded me of the children of the more Bohemian parents at my private primary. They were slightly frightening, because they were too grown-up for children. Their parents were not the protective sort.

But although the Millers went with their principles in the matter of education, they still had a lot of unfair advantages when it came to personal contacts. And so William went into the Meeja through the contacts of his father, and nothing, absolutely nothing changed. He ended up buying a house on the same road. Middle-class children are just not allowed to fail. Their parents couldn't live with it.

Jonathan Miller wasn't a wonderful father, in spite of being a clever and very engaging man. He liked to hear his own voice too much. He never held back from his dramatic suicidal threats out of anxiety for his children. He also liked to have his friends around all the time to the extent that his children must always have felt unimportant. His son says that he always loved him very much, but the book is full of complaints about his parenting. 

Alan Bennett - Untold Stories

I have read this book before but I think I skipped the diaries as they made me feel so cast down. There is a downbeat note to them. A dying fall. I love his writing in that it's well structured and elegant, I seem to agree with his sentiments quite consistently, but the way he writes is not cheering. I feel as though my head has been buried in a vat of mud. He is brave though, in that he confronts, amongst other things, the awfulness of our old people's homes. His latest play is set in such a home and I think I should go and see it. Perhaps he has changed his mind about such places.

Untold Stories begins with an account of Bennett's mother's mental illness - delusions caused by depression. I suppose such a frank account is rare. My daughter is about to spend a year studying psychiatric illness and medicine and it is on the reading list supplied by the medical school. I think it will also help her to understand what kind of mindset older people may have: that is: they may not have travelled much, have very modest aspirations, be very suspicious of new and foreign things, and yet make a big deal of themselves, express strong pride in their family, their hometown, the people they know.

A good radio programme, and other entertainments

Michael Frayn's Matchbox theatre  LISTEN NOW!!

Very funny - and beautiful - dialogue between Joanna Lumley and Roger Allam. Also enjoyed David Attenborough as himself.

The Lady in the Van

Miss Shepherd was very unreasonable.

Maggie Smith is actually still very soignee

Alan Bennett makes London look like a village.

Took my mother to see this yesterday - she is a long-time admirer of Alan Bennett. She really likes his Northern accent, his modest demeanour, his down-homeliness. Maggie Smith was amazingly good. She is an old lady playing an old lady - but there is a lot of physicality involved - and a lot of mixed and confused emotion for her to convey - and she is brilliant. I like the post-modern Alan Bennetts talking to each other, and the street of arty people (including the afore-mentioned Roger Allam. I'm afraid I thought it went on too long.

Spectre

this is an excellent Bond with all the usual elements: a car chase, a shoot out, a fist fight, a torture scene, a woman (who is far too young for him; Daniel Craig seems to be embarrassed by his own un-avuncular intentions), an aerial chase, a race against the clock, a life-saving gadget, some humour and a tense visit to the secret headquarters of an evil empire. It takes place in some wonderful locations and, of course, London. It has one unusual element: that is:  Q, M, another scrabble letter and Miss Moneypenny all come out and help Bond when the chips are down. There is something a bit political about it but it is quite subtle: something about not trusting the new just because it's new. A new technology may look slick but have a sly purpose we do not want - very post Edward Snowden.

Suffragettes

This was another script by the amazing Abi Morgan. It showed that women were powerless when they fought for the vote. They had no rights over their own children, they were subject to abuse and couldn't fight back. The vote didn't do everything for them but it gave them a start in winning equal rights. And hoorah for Meryl Streep who came on and showed what a bit of (actually a lot of) charisma can do for a cause.

HBC doesn't often play intelligent and earnest - it suits her.

There are too many people without hats in this film. At this time, everyone wore a hat.

Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe - a really enjoyable read

This book is comprised of letters. In 1982 the 20-year-old Nina came to London to work as a nanny to the lively sons of  a single parent who lived in Camden. The mum worked at the London Review of Books and lived in the most literary street in town! Across the road lived Alan Bennett, who came round to dinner every evening and made helpful suggestions about the food, and everything else. Along the road lived the Millers. Jonathan Miller seemed to be famous for his operas. Nina got the impression he was an opera singer, and when she mentioned his singing everyone thought her hilarious. Next door lived Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin, with their son, and further along lived Debbie Moggach. These are just some of the characters who pop up in the story of Nina: (Nina and how she discovered literature!) the best thing about it being that Nina had no idea these letters to her sister, a nurse back home, would ever be published. She wrote about the minutiae of life: like the fridge making a noise, what the other nannies said, what the boys said, what Mary-Kay said.  She reports many conversations exactly like writing a play.

The reason her style is so great is that she lets all the characters speak for themselves.  She has a quite simple way of writing about her likes and dislikes, but she finds other people so interesting that she doesn't seem to write about herself much. (She is hardly going to describe herself to her sister, is she?) So we have her voice and we have all her comments about everyone, and she is young and fun, having a good time, with a great talent for taking people as they come. I didn't find the letters funny to start with but she becomes very funny as time goes on.

An article by Nina takes me back to that time, they were great times to be young. There was a rush to get into the few good jobs but it was equally OK to take low-level jobs and save to travel. But of course we worried that we were missing the boat. It's only natural.

(This is the 2nd half of it. It's all here. )

Being a London nanny was fantastic. The family was fun to be with and I fitted in like an older sister. To start with, I was preoccupied with domestic stuff, and my letters reveal much about the grocery shopping, the choice of soap powder and Mary-Kay's hair cuts. Then I met a friend, the helper at biographer Claire Tomalin's house (next door but one) and he dispelled the "You can't go to university" myth. In fact, he said "You should go" and my boss agreed, even though it would be quite inconvenient for her.

And it changed me. It wasn't that I had been excluded or underprivileged, I had had my share of devoted teachers and my family home was crammed with books, but the double whammy of not being entered for O-levels and being told I would never go to university had defined my adult life up to then. Having clever, trustworthy people around me saying I had all sorts of options marked a change of outlook for me. I stopped worrying about whether or not someone made their share of cups of tea or what shoes they wore and picked up a book. It sounds corny, but it's true.

So I read books that were interesting enough to captivate or stuffy enough to annoy, and I went to study humanities at Thames Polytechnic. It was marvellous: the learning, but more so "being a student". I was surrounded by silly 18-year-olds such as my friend Stella who lazed around and took it all for granted, earnest mature students whose work was well thought out and always typed, dropouts who should have been at Cambridge or Bristol, and local people who gained access and were as thrilled as I was to be there. It was a beautiful mix, and our tutors were of the modern type who had read Stuart Hall and Terry Eagleton and scrapped with the fuddy‑duddies. They took us to see plays and to hear thinkers think and talk, and I think we learned to think and to talk ourselves.

In 1987, we graduated and most of us just got jobs in shops or cafes. Some got stalls at Camden market and sold handmade trinkets or multicoloured candles and had the weekdays off to make the trinkets in front of the telly. We earned enough to pay the rent and buy paperbacks and have a niceish time reading and chatting in our dingy flats until the moment seemed right (a couple of years later, usually) to move into our "professional career". Unlike graduates of today, we didn't think we had missed the boat, we didn't panic about not having stepped on to any sort of ladder.

I don't think it was just me. Graduates back then were confident that opportunities were there but, mainly, we weren't made to think of ourselves as successes or failures, particularly at such a young age. Of course, there were fewer graduates then and most of us had grants so we didn't have huge bills to pay when we left. There was less parental expectation and, consequently, less parental involvement. We never expected to live at home again as many have to nowadays. We probably also never considered working for free (in internships or work experience).

In the 1980s, graduates I knew chose to earn enough to pay the rent and to work in "dead-end" jobs for a while. Graduates now have to do the same but the difference is that they feel they have failed by doing so, that they are wasting their time. Is this just about student loans or is it part of a bigger panic about losing out? Is it forgetting part of the reason why they went to university in the first place? And should we stop this rushing into adulthood, this panic about success? Quite possibly, reading a wonderful novel behind the till of an empty shop is a good, and, dare I say, more "productive" way to spend your early 20s.

Stan's collection, Adaptation, Gran Torino

My son collects films - DVDs and Blu-ray. He knows that he doesn't need to do this; he knows that soon nobody will need a hard copy because they can just stream them, but he wants to own the artifacts that he likes the most, and these things are films.

Adaptation is a study in absurdity in that it stops being an examination of how hard it is to create art and becomes a study in how easy it is to undermine a high purpose by adopting a formula, and it is very funny. Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep play their roles brilliantly, and as for Chris Cooper, you don't know he's acting. I think it should have won a screenwriting Oscar for being original and clever, but having said that, having the writer (Charlie Kaufman) up there talking to himself is not new. Alan Bennett has also done it. He wrote about writing about a tricky subject in "The Lady in the Van", and dramatised his arguments with himself, presumably he had the joy of casting someone who could imitate himself. In this film you have a writer who's writing about another writer's account of her interactions and feelings with a rough diamond orchid stealer. It sounds crazy and in the end it is. But when the writer has got stuck in a hole, his twin brother Donald (who doesn't exist) is there with his worldly advice and by using all the non -respectable schlocky writing tricks in the book, he pulls it all together.

I can't tell you how not interested I am in cars. I had no idea that a Gran Torino is a car. But I gave ten minutes to a film of that name and then I had to watch the whole thing. It's great - a beautifully constructed film with a strong story. The car has practically nothing to do with it - it's a film about poverty of opportunity in the immigrant community, gang culture, and an angry old boy who doesn't give a shit, and then learns to give a shit. It says on the box it's a must-see, and I do agree, for a change. Clint Eastwood; what a guy.

Postscript: The Donald Kaufman character says something wonderful about love. He loved a girl and she laughed at him behind his back. He said he knew she laughed but he loved her and she couldn't take that away from him. Charlie says "but she thought you were pathetic." Donald says "That was her business. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago."

That's for all of us who loved in vain, someone who laughed at us.