A Life Like Other People's

In 1961-62, Wendy and I and the two toddlers we had in those days had to survive for a year in London on a stipend meant for a single man without dependents. We rented a furnished part-house in Finsbury Park, 30 Newington Green, from a biochemist at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, who had a sabbatical year in USA. Most days I walked several miles to my office in the Social Medicine Research Unit behind the London Hospital Medical College on Whitechapel Road. Wendy made our financial survival possible by feeding us very well at rock bottom prices, walking two miles each way to Ridley Road street market, pushing David in the stroller, with Rebecca walking beside her. Usually Rebecca's little legs couldn't manage the walk home as well, so Wendy came back from the market balancing both kids on top of the spuds, sprouts, carrots and cheapest cuts of meat in the stroller. It was the nearest we came to living in real poverty. It was a wonderfully happy year, in some ways the best year we ever had, the year in which we discovered all the things you can do in London without having to spend a lot of money, or indeed, any money at all. 

We were too poor to take in the rich theatrical offerings available in the West End of London. My father took us to a vaudeville show once. And I took Wendy to see Beyond the Fringe as a special treat for her birthday. We saw it with the original cast and the original skits. It was one of the best things we ever saw on stage. The cast, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett, were four youngsters, fresh out of Oxford, on the threshhold of outstanding, brilliant careers.

Alan Bennett - quiet, lethally witty, a penetrating social critic - was the most thoughtful of the four.  He went on to achieve fame as a playwright and man of letters, best known for his TV plays Talking Heads, and for the west end success of his stage play that became an even more successful movie, The Madness of King George.

Recently I've been reading his memoir, A Life Like Other People's.  I knew that he, like Peter Cook, came from a working class family in the north of England - his accent reveals this, mellowed though it is by his years at Oxford. I knew nothing about his family or about the circumstances in which he grew up. His quietly understated account of working class family life in the aftermath of the great depression of the 1930s and during the 1939-45 world war describes his mother's recurrent bouts of severe depression, the shadowy family history of suicide, and the emotional ups and downs of his two aunts. One aunt joined the WAAFs and went to exotic foreign parts - India, the Far East - while the other stayed on in a department store. Both had emotional and marital troubles. The story reads to me like a family with the heritable condition, bipolar disorder. It describes also how such families made their way in the world, living hand to mouth, making their own entertainment, finding happiness in simple pleasures.  His unhappy Mam laments that theirs is not a life like other people's, but I think Alan Bennett describes a family life very much like that of tens of thousands of other people in England at that time. He is a master of the English language, and this little book, like everything of his that I've read, provides genuine aesthetic pleasure from the prose alone. I picked it up for a dollar in a jumble sale.  It's a keeper, that will go into the set of book shelves where I keep my most precious books.