Untold Stories

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There was the outbreak of war in September 1939, the actual declaration catching us on a tram going down to Vicar Lane bus station to get a bus to safety and Pateley Bridge; VE night outside Guildford Town Hall, me on my Uncle George’s shoulders marvelling at floodlights which I’d never seen before.

Alan Bennett Untold Stories: Part 1: Stories by Alan Bennett Alan Bennett Untold Stories: Part 1: Stories by Alan Bennett

Few nights passed uninterrupted and Dad would wake to find the place beside him empty, Mam scrabbling at the lock of the outside door or standing by the bedroom window looking out at a car in the carpark that she said was watching the house. Bennett’s career began in the epoch-making 1960s satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe, the experience of which perhaps trained him in the careful crafting of comic wordplay and semi-satirical asides so evident in later dramatic works.To date he has been actor, director and broadcaster, and written for stage, television, radio and film. Later, teaching at Magdalen, I had as a pupil an irritating, distracted boy who would arrive two hours late for tutorials or ignore them altogether, and if he did turn up with an essay it would be sixty or seventy pages long. The hospitals I had been in previously were calm and unhurried; voices were hushed; sickness, during visiting hours at least, went hand in hand with decorum. The younger son of a Co-op butcher, Walter, and his wife, Lilian Mary (née Peel), Bennett attended Christ Church, Upper Armley, Church of England School (in the same class as Barbara Taylor Bradford), and then Leeds Modern School (now Lawnswood School). We had left Mam at the hospital that morning looking even after weeks of illness not much different from her usual self; weeping and distraught, it’s true, but still plump and pretty, clutching her everlasting handbag and still somehow managing to face the world.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett, First Edition - AbeBooks Untold Stories by Alan Bennett, First Edition - AbeBooks

He said he "loosely" based The History Boys on his experiences at the school and his admission to Oxford. Part of me probably still thought of neurosis as somehow ‘put on’, a way of making oneself interesting – the reason why, when I was younger, I thought of myself as slightly neurotic. Dad was not uncheerful either, relieved that now at any rate something was going to be done and that she was ‘in professional hands’. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full time, his first stage play, Forty Years On, being produced in 1968.

With characteristic modesty, he presents it as the equivalent of the Christmas annuals of his youth, though looked at in that light, at 650-odd pages, it is certainly a bumper issue. But it may all have been romance; in private life Beatrice Lillie was Lady Peel and my aunties even adduced her as a distant connection.