Epiphanies in Chintz

I was listening to the wonderful The Reunion on Radio 4 this morning, which gathered Alan Bennett and the living actors and producers who made his seminal series Talking Heads back in the 80s. Every one was a quiet triumph of democratic art: closely observed revelations of the profound moments that all of us experience, often unnoticed by ourselves and others in a noisy culture which tends to overlook people like his subjects: older women, northerners and the petit-bourgeoisie.





It reminded me of half an hour I spent in a café in Newcastle-under-Lyme in late 1996, a half-hour which was as close to a Talking Heads script – as funny and sad – as anything I've ever experienced. I was enduring one of my short periods of unemployment, between graduation and starting an MA. Living in the depths of the countryside, I had to walk a fair distance to catch the twice-daily bus into town to sign-on for the dole, a magnificent £24 per week. Having hours to wait for the return trip, I would spend hours in the library, then splurge £1.20 on tea and toast in a very chintzy café, accompanied by the old broadsheet Guardian. I liked the pots of tea and patterned china, proper tablecloths butter knives.

That day, the only other customers were two old ladies. They wore hats, sensible raincoats and floral dresses: prime Alan Bennett characters. They had tartan shopping trolleys and small dogs (also wearing tartan). One was recently widowed and struggling to cope with her new condition. She explained to her companion that the hardest part was meeting old friends. I can still hear the desolation as she said 'I've seen them spot me coming and cross the road because they don't know what to say to me'. I'd been to plenty of funerals by that point and lost enough relatives to appreciate the situation: even now I find it hard to say anything that isn't cliched, patronising or useless. But what really moved me was that she wasn't bitter or angry: despite her loss and grief, she understood and even empathised with what her friends felt.

I can't remember what her colleague said – I think it was supportively sympathetic. But then the conversation took another turn. They started discussing the deceased's funeral, which they agreed was a fine send-off for a decent man. Good turnout, nice hymns, decent spread afterwards. The only problem, the widow explained, was the argument she'd had with the undertakers the day before. Clearly snatched from life unexpectedly, her husband had been to Marks the week before, and they'd bought him some new pants. 'Nice white ones - best they had. He always got his pants from Marks'. Denied the chance to wear them in life, his widow told the undertakers that he would wear them in death. For some reason, they demurred, explaining that while the body would be dressed in a suit, they didn't see much point in putting on underwear too. 'But I told them flat. He'd wear his new pants and that's that. You can't be buried in no pants, I told them. It's not right'.

By this point, I was torn between tears and laughter, and the sound of my newspaper rustling in my shaking hands was becoming obvious, so I left in a state of both admiration and sympathy for her. I don't know whether all undertakers are that difficult when it comes to corpsewear, but it struck me as an unnecessary bit of cavilling in a moment of grief. I liked her for her insistence that certain standards apply beyond the requirements of practicality, and I'd learned something devastating about how we deal with loss. I don't know if I'm a particularly nice person, but I think that half-hour taught me that I wasn't the star in the drama of life, and that kindness and a little empathy is more important than any of the brasher passions.

Sound familiar

In a trenchant defence of the public moral and intellectual value of libraries (and not just as book warehouses), Alan Bennett writes this:

a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled. He – and occasionally she – is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been written and the ground to be covered.’ 

‘All these books. I’ll never catch up,’ wails the young Joe Orton in the film script of Prick Up Your Ears, and in The Old Country another young man reacts more dramatically, by hurling half the books to the floor. In Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf someone else gives vent to their frustration with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out E.M. Forster with a big cigar. Orton himself notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books himself. This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with everybody standing with their back to me; I could not find a way in. 

Welcome to my world. Even worse, I've bought the bloody things.  It feels faintly embarrassing to be defending libraries against Conservative attacks. After all, the stately homes from whence (see that, Ben?) the current crop have oiled, all have private libraries of their own. Eton has, no doubt, a fine library, and the libraries of the Oxford colleges inhabited by these lordly types are so fine as to be tourist attractions.

Perhaps that's the problem. Their home libraries aren't resources, they're decoration. Their college libraries are literally exclusive. The oiks can buy tickets to ooh and aah at the leather bindings and stern busts, but they're not invited to open the books. This lot resent the idea that they (and their imaginary public) should pay taxes for people to read Catherine Cookson and Horrid Histories and Sven Hassel etc.

To them, knowledge and enjoyment are private goods to be bought and paid for. To me, libraries are where you gain your freedom. My parents are highly educated, literate types. But if I read only the books they bought, I'd have a fantastic working knowledge of church architecture, Catholic doctrine, dermatological complaints, paediatric medicine and hymn lyrics. Admittedly, I've soaked up a lot of this stuff. But it was libraries which let me explore space and time, find out about the radical histories of Britain, Ireland, Spain, discover science and rebellion and poetry and Tom Paine and Mervyn Peake and Willa Cather. Much of this was smuggled into the house, caused violent arguments and got returned unread by and angry parent.

And if annoying your parents isn't a good enough reason to defend libraries, nothing is.

Last word to Bennett:

I have been discussing libraries as places and in the current struggle to preserve public libraries not enough stress has been laid on the library as a place not just a facility. To a child living in high flats, say, where space is at a premium and peace and quiet not always easy to find, a library is a haven. But, saying that, a library needs to be handy and local; it shouldn’t require an expedition. Municipal authorities of all parties point to splendid new and scheduled central libraries as if this discharges them of their obligations. It doesn’t. For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose local libraries it is children who will suffer. Of the libraries I have mentioned the most important for me was that first one, the dark and unprepossessing Armley Junior Library. I had just learned to read. I needed books. Add computers to that requirement maybe but a child from a poor family is today in exactly the same boat.  

It’s hard not to think that like other Tory policies privatising the libraries has been lying dormant for 15 years, just waiting for a convenient crisis to smuggle it through. Libraries are, after all, as another think tank clown opined a few weeks ago, ‘a valuable retail outlet’.