Alan Bennett, now 90, hasn’t published anything original in book form for five years. In the meantime – the Covid years and the Johnson years and the Truss month – readers have had to be content with the peerless annual diaries he writes for the London Review of Books, yearly proof that his special ear for English comedy and sudden pathos is undimmed. This novella is in part his reflection on those years, set inevitably in a care home, the unlikely frontline of national crisis during the pandemic.
Bennett, of course, knows his way around those institutional corridors. He inhabited them in perhaps the most memorable episode of his Talking Heads series, Thora Hird’s Waiting for the Telegram. That episode was not remade when Nicholas Hytner recast the whole series during lockdown, in part because social distancing prevented it, and in part because its sentiment might have been too much for the nation to bear. The gap of a couple of years, however, allows Bennett to frame that period with more imaginative certainty.
The story is a kind of parable. It focuses on the residents of Hill Topp House, a self-consciously upmarket establishment that makes the promise to potential “clients” of “a choir on special occasions and a glass of dry sherry”. It is run by the authoritarian Mrs McBryde who threatens her “community” with banishment to “down the hill” to Low Moor, a more basic council facility, in the event of rule-breaking – of which, with inhibitions loosened by frustration and dementia, there is inevitably plenty. It is Mrs McBryde’s belief that the virus, when it comes, will not afflict Hill Topp – the place is too rarefied for common germs, “the wind would take care of them” – but of course those snobberies are no defence.
That wider tragedy is the backdrop to a surface comedy in which Bennett employs his repertoire of middle-England satire: the anticipated pitch-perfect exchanges about chiropody or babies’ names or war memories, those conversational non sequiturs that have survived intact from his awkward childhood. The initial drama is provided by the eldest resident Mr Woodruff, the home’s inveterate flasher. “Are you not curious?” he asks Mrs Foss, a new arrival, of his habit. “No,” she says, “I was in the St John Ambulance Brigade.”
In some ways the book feels like a wry little rejoinder by Bennett to Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which has invaded this territory without much nuance or subtlety. Death is a presence here, but it is not to be solved by any senior citizens’ famous five. Instead, the advance of the virus through Hill Topp becomes a vehicle for something odder, after Mrs McBryde herself succumbs despite explaining in A&E that it couldn’t get her (“The disease was something that was supposed to single out old people and the occasional Asian”). In her absence, the surviving residents take back control of their lives – “arthritis permitting, they scampered” – encouraged by Gus, the window cleaner, who provides extra services to the frustrated and the curious – men and women alike – in the tool shed, on a rota.
Even as a young man, Bennett seemed intrigued by the taboo-breaking possibilities of older age. He expressed that loosening of his own buttoned-up nature in the more confessional tone of Untold Stories (2006), which included his frank account of his mother’s depressive illness that shadowed his childhood, and his candidness about being gay. In his 2009 play The Habit of Art, about the last year of WH Auden’s life, he wrote about locating his Late Style, the capitals expressing his ironic sense of that description: “Feeling I’d scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I’m near the end of it. I’m not quite sure what Late Style means except that it’s some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up.”
This little book proves he is still enjoying finding ways to utilise that authorial blue badge.