Keeping On Keeping On by Alan Bennett

Author:Alan Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2013

3 January, Yorkshire. The year kicks off with a small trespass when we drive over from Ramsgill via Ripon and Thirsk to Rievaulx. However the abbey is closed, seemingly until the middle of February, which infuriates us both, and though at seventy-eight and with an artificial hip it’s not something I feel I should be doing, we scale the five-bar gate and break in. The place is of course empty and though it’s quite muddy underfoot, an illicit delight. It’s warm and windless, the stones of the abbey sodden and brown from the amount of moisture they’ve absorbed. Spectacular here are the toilet arrangements, the reredorter set above a narrow chasm with a stream still running along the bottom. Unique, though (or at least I haven’t seen another), is the tannery complete with its various vats, a small factory in the heart of the abbey and which must have stunk as tanneries always did. I remember the tannery down Stanningley Road opposite Armley Park School in Leeds which my brother and I (en route for the Western cinema) always ran past holding our noses. The site at Rievaulx is just over the wall from the abbot’s lodgings, which smelly though medieval abbeys were, must have been hard to take. Coming away we scale the gate again, happy to have outwitted authority, but since all that stands between Open and Closed is a five-bar gate it’s maybe English Heritage’s way of turning a blind eye.

11 January. The doorbell goes around noon. I’m expecting Antony Crolla, the photographer, so don’t look through the window and open the door to find what I take to be a builder with a loose piece of flex in his hand and what could be a meter. He says he’s working at a house nearby but needs to check our drain which may have a hairline crack. He makes to come in, but I say that if there is any work needs doing we have a builder of our own and in any case my partner deals with all that. He then claims to have spoken to my ‘boyfriend’ who says it’s OK. I shut the door on him and telephone R., the so-called builder meanwhile banging on the door. R. of course has never spoken to anyone, so I go back to the door where, as soon as I open it, the caller gets his foot in the door (literally). Our friend Bridget, who’s downstairs, now comes up and at the sight of a third party he takes fright, retreating to a white van waiting opposite with its engine running which drives off so quickly I fail to get the number. Thinking about it afterwards, where he went wrong was in not being ingratiating enough or trying to explain what the ‘drain problem’ was and graduating straight to the frenzied banging on the door; ‘your boyfriend’ didn’t help either. Like all crooks he was affronted when his honesty was questioned, if only because it implied a criticism of his performance.

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