Somewhere, there must be a PhD: Flashing: Exhibitionistic Disorder in the Oeuvre of Alan Bennett. It’s there in the first of his Talking Heads monologues (‘He’s been had up for exposing himself in Sainsbury’s doorway – as mother said, Tesco, you could understand it’) and in the last, Waiting for the Telegram, which opened with Thora Hird, one-time presenter of Songs of Praise, saying: ‘I saw this feller’s what-do-you-call-it today.’
It takes three pages for a what-do-you-call-it to appear in Killing Time, Bennett’s new novella, which is set in Hill Topp House old people’s home. Mr Woodruff, a resident, is indefatigable, his self-exposure a running motif as ‘not for the first time, he tried to show Audrey his willy’. It’s the detail that distinguishes the line (‘tried to’). Mr Woodruff finds that incontinence pads hinder his usually virtuosic display.
It’s at the bottom of Killing Time’s first page when anyone ignorant of whom they were reading might suspect Alan Bennett. ‘He’s dead, Mr Ellis. Mr Firbank was always the main man. Was it him you were wanting?’ Any other writer would put, I think: ‘Mr Ellis is dead. Mr Firbank was always in charge. Was it him you wanted to speak to?’ The differences are small, but in them lies the key to Bennett’s mastery, his ear for the tiny idiosyncrasies of language and all that they reveal. His senior citizens are not the doughty mavericks, sound of bladder and mind, who appear in Ronald Harwood’s Quartet or the sitcom Waiting for God. Long ago Bennett created a world, unarguably his own, its innovation now disguised by familiarity. Innumerable parodists are wrong to portray him as cosy: his work, underneath the willies and what-do-you-call-ems, has encompassed mental illness, serial killers, Aids, paedophilia and, above all, old age’s slow painful waiting game, whether for a telegram or for God.
That said, Bennett has got kinder to his elderly. In a final monologue for Thora Hird, The Last of the Sun, he offered his octogenarian narrator something approaching a sex life and then dared to show her enjoying it. In Killing Time the residents of Hill Topp House spend their tedious interlude between life and crematorium in various ways: reading, chatting, jigsaws, exhibitionism and sex. Bennett has his usual fun with the inmates, of course, who these days are called Amelia and Charlene rather than Violet and Doris, but beneath the humour he mines from the confusions and indignities and incontinence, he has held fast to the truism that the old had life, before they didn’t.
Then, Covid. Lockdowns, facemasks, bubbles (‘Where do you get them, these bubbles?’). Residents start to die. The novella splinters into tiny sections, glimpses of life and death and the bit in between. Bennett does not rage against the dying of the light – his characters are resigned to mortality – but against political incompetence. The rage appears not in explicit condemnation but in the increasing terseness of the prose. Alone, his elderly expire in corridors and in short, unadorned sentences. Nothing more need be said. But to those few who survive he gives a chance to enjoy the last of the sun. As in a geriatric Lord of the Flies, anarchy prevails amid the wreckage; and in anarchy, Bennett seems to say, comes freedom of a kind. Be it jigsaws, sex, or setting the place ablaze, there are different ways to kill time even as it kills you.
Another PhD on Bennett would do well to focus on chiropody (‘And did those feet…’: Podiatry in the Oeuvre of… etc). As shadows lengthen so do toenails. Who could forget the creepy Mr Dunderdale in Miss Fozzard Finds her Feet: ‘If I may, I’ll just begin by clipping your toenails’? Or A Woman of No Importance: ‘Mrs Maudsley’s going on about getting her toenails cut, they catch on the sheet’? In Killing Time, one lady has a memorable set painted emerald green, ‘which was all some of the mourners knew her by’. By their toenails ye shall know them. Bennett sees how, within diminished and diminishing lives, the most trivial of details loom largest. Clipping my father’s toenails in the hospice is my clearest and most intimate memory of his dying.
The chiropodist in Killing Time is Mr Jimson, ‘hand-hoovering up the meagre offcuts from Miss Halliwell’s toes’. Mr Jimson has a distinguished literary forebear in Miss Mowcher, the diminutive chiropodist in David Copperfield, who collects the toenail clippings of a Russian prince: ‘I give ’em away to the young ladies. They put ’em in albums, I believe.’ Mr Jimson has similar ideas: ‘If you were famous, Margaret, I could get a good price for these on eBay.’
At 90, Alan Bennett is still hoovering up the meagre offcuts from life, bittersweet clippings from the killing time.
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