Miss Ruddock in A lady of Letters and Doris in A Cream Cracker under the Settee are women lost in another era. The whole focus of their lives is centred on one thing, for Doris it is her obsession with cleanliness and probably its effect on her late husband Walter, and for Miss Ruddock, it is her writing. Miss Ruddock enters into correspondence as a substitute for real-life conversation and she sees a reply as almost an invitation to continue the correspondence, almost as a penfreind would. They both have a hard time accepting help from ‘outside agencies’, such as Zulema, the home help and the social workers, they remember a time when neighbours would help in times of loneliness or need.
As Miss Ruddock says “My Mother knew everybody in this street. She could reel off the occupants of every single house. Everybody could, once upon a time. Now, they come and go. That’s why these tragedies happen. Nobody watching”. (Bennett, 2001, p73)
Every street has one, a ‘curtain twitcher’, they are probably ladies of a certain age, they live alone, and the rest of the world has left them behind. Now that people are barely on nodding terms with their neighbours, it is easy to draw the wrong conclusion, as the full picture isn’t revealed through the curtains.
Miss Ruddock found this to her cost when she assumed the young couple across the road had neglected their child. It is too easy to assume the worst of people, too easy to stereotype people who don’t live as we do and look as we do.
Miss Ruddock makes assumptions about the young couple purely on appearances, their child seems thin, the father has a tattoo and they don’t put a cloth on the table when they have tea. In her eyes this makes them suspect, it gives her license to guess what goes on in their home and justifies her low opinion of them.
It is a sad reflection on so many lonely lives that Irene Ruddock is only truly happy in prison where she has a captive audience and ‘friends’ at last.
Doris on the other hand can imagine people like Miss Ruddock commenting about her because she is no longer able to maintain the standards she feels are necessary to set her apart. She worries about the leaves which she can’t get her home help to sweep up, she comments “I wouldn’t care if they were my leaves. They’re not my leaves. They’re next-doors leaves. We don’t have any leaves. I know that for a fact. We’ve only got the one little bush and its evergreen, so I’m certain they’re not my leaves. Only other folks won’t know that. They see the bush and they see the path and they think, ‘thems her leaves.’ Well they’re not”. (Bennett, 2001, p110)
Doris also comments on the lack of community, she also used to know her neighbours and now she wonders whom she could alert to her predicament. When she does hear someone in the garden it turns out to be just the sort that Doris and Miss Ruddock would both shun, a young lad with no sense of neighbourliness at all, who sees fit to urinate in the garden. It is only when Doris has shouted at the lad to clear off that she realises she has chased away what could be her only chance of rescue.
Although Doris is lonely, it is a state she prefers to the only alternative that seems to be on offer, Stafford House. She isn’t so lonely that she would enjoy the company of the type to be in an elderly person’s home, as she puts it ‘smelling of pee’. (Bennett, 2001, p116)
Both ladies look back fondly to days gone by and they share a kind of naiveté that is common in the older generations.
The same kind of woman is seen in Soldiering On and although Muriel is probably higher up the social scale than the previous two characters, she shares the same air of innocence.
At first glance she appears a strong military type, but as the story develops it becomes obvious that she is a poor judge of character. She is oblivious to what the men in her life are really like, her upstanding husband has been abusing their daughter and the son she adores is a weak fraud.
Her comment about mental illness is very illuminating, it can, she states ‘…occur in the best-regulated families and nobody knows why. I mean take us. Why have we been singled out? Loving parents. Perfectly normal childhood, then this’. (Bennett, 2001, p101)
It is an attitude that prevails all too often, with people living in the same house but not really knowing each other, and only recognising the qualities they want to. According to Delia Dick in her notes on Talking Heads, Muriel ‘lacks not only self awareness but is sometimes seriously unable to understand what is going on’. (Dick, 1999, p73)
As Delia Dick points out this monologue is ‘more of tragedy than comedy’ (Dick, 1999, p73) a point of view shared quite early on by the reader, although not a view shared by Muriel at all. She goes to great lengths to point out that she is not a ‘tragic woman’ although the end of the monologue sees her alone and without any contact with her adored son.
Her blinkered attitude is commented on in a review by Brendan Kenny, he observes that ‘…our sympathy for her gradual social and economic privation is offset by the damage to the family of her collusive blindness to its shortcomings’ (www.museum.tv. Accessed 26/01/03)
Muriel shares some commonality with Susan in Bed among the Lentils, on the face of things they both have successful lives in a middle class setting and their husbands are seen as pillars of the community. The striking difference of course is that Muriel’s husband is dead and she refers to him throughout in the past tense.
Both women seem to have lost their own identity and are only seen in the context of being their husbands wives, Muriel’s husband referred to her as ‘my shoeshine lady’ and Susan is constantly addressed as ‘Mrs Vicar’.
Susan seems to be completely lost; as Brendan Kenny noted, she is ‘…despite her wit and perceptiveness a figure of pathos’ (www.museum.tv). Scathing in her references to God and seeing Geoffrey’s role as a job rather than a vocation, she feels that if she were to ask her husband what he really thought of God, he wouldn’t know, consequently, she sees Geoffrey as a social climber rather than a man of God.
As the dynamic vicar, her husband is adored by his parishioners and Susan feels in the way, she doesn’t realise at this stage that everyone knows about her drink problem and Geoffrey is not only enjoying his parishioners adoration but also their commiseration.
Susan cannot find comfort in any aspect of her life; she doesn’t feel equipped to fulfil the role of the Vicars wife, and as she points out, she is lacking ‘All the weapons in the armoury of any upstanding Anglican lady’. (Bennett, 2001, p60) Her inability to arrange flowers is at the centre of the most amusing and illuminating section of the monologue, it marks the time she becomes aware that her drinking is common knowledge, it is hilarious to observe Susan pitting her wits against Mrs Shrubsole whilst getting progressively more drunk.
Her descriptions of her sex life are funny and telling, she describes her liaisons with Geoffrey as ‘rare and desiccated’ and consequently only worth ten pence in the collection plate when the sermon Geoffrey delivers is about ‘offering our sex to god’. (Bennett, 2001, p60) It is only when she embarks on a sexual affair with Mr Ramesh that Susan realises what ‘all the fuss is about’ regarding sex. The consequence of Susan’s inability to fulfil her role as the vicar’s wife is loneliness; she is not regarded in the community and is suffered by the parishioners because they hold her husband in such high esteem. Geoffrey appears to have no feelings for his wife at all, indeed in the first few paragraphs the impression is one of tolerance.
It is only when Geoffrey realises the importance of Susan’s redemption in the eyes of the church hierarchy that he begins to see her as an advantage. He can take the praise for his wife’s sobriety and attribute it to the power of prayer, as Susan observes ‘the credit for the road to Damascus goes to Mr Ramesh’ not to ‘Geoffrey’s chum, the Deity, moving in his well-known mysterious way’. (Bennett, 2001, p66)
Alan Bennett claims the inspiration for Bed among the Lentils came from a rather timid inscription he read on the fly-leaf of a hymn book at Giggleswick School, it read, ‘Get lost, Jesus’. The image comes to mind of Susan writing just that, perhaps as she watches her adversary Mrs Shrubsole creating another floral masterpiece. (Bennett, 2001, p33)
In a slightly different way Alan Bennett demonstrates Grahams loneliness in A Chip in the Sugar. We see how Graham’s loneliness is centred on his relationship with his mother; he is perhaps not so much lonely, as afraid of being alone.
The suggestion of mental illness is shown throughout the piece although the impression is that it is under control until Mr Turnbull comes along to upset Grahams ‘stable environment’. (Bennett, 2001, p48)
There is also a hint of sexual ambiguity, not only with Mrs Whittaker’s references to her son’s ‘magazines’, but also by Graham’s whole demeanour. He is portrayed as a fussy, rather feminine, old fashioned man; he enjoys the responsibility of his mother’s care and enjoys the fact that she admires some of his qualities. The fact that his mother is all to easily swayed by the rather radical Mr Turnbull is particularly hard for Geoffrey to accept.
It is with almost pathetic relief that Graham can reveal to his mother Mr Turnbull’s duplicity, and his relief at the return of the stability he craves is almost tangible.
Talking Heads are small stories, about small lives, and in the context of great literature they occupy a very small space. They are, however, stories that can strike a chord with almost everyone. They mirror real life and tell funny, amusing tales about people we see every day, we all know a Graham or a Miss Ruddock and perhaps we should all get to know a Doris.
Perhaps Alan Bennett is making a social statement with Talking Heads. An undercurrent of dismay at the lack of a community or community spirit is evident in more than one of the stories, and the sense of isolation and loneliness felt by several of the characters perhaps stems from the authors own experiences.
There is no impression of an unhappy early life; on the contrary, it must have had its wry and amusing side to provide such a wealth of characters.
It is feasible that the writer had in mind a chance to use some of his anecdotal stories of family members and friends to an amusing and sometimes thought provoking end. It may have been his way of dealing with painful issues such as his mothers depression and his own sexuality whilst at the same time giving the reader food for thought on subjects as diverse as incest and loneliness.
