The Lady in The Van

I recently saw a Trailer for The Lady In The Van, which stars Maggie Smith in the titular role.  I'm excited about this movie, which is based on the diary entries Alan Bennett made about the woman who lived in his driveway.  I was very touched by the story when I read it back in medical school - so touched that I visited Alan Bennett's driveway when I went to London in 2007.  Here's my journal entry about the day I did that.  

Day Three 2007.  Camden Yellow

My alarm goes off at 8:30, but I find it impossible to get up.  I don’t end up leaving the hotel until almost 11, and the first order of business is to go back to the National Gallery and exchange my Italian Catalog for an English one.  My request stupefies the clerk and she has to get her boss to help her.  Then it’s on to the National Portrait Gallery, which is right around the corner.  I pass the Edith Cavell memorial, which bears the inscription “It is not enough to be a Patriot, I must have bitterness and hatred in my heart for no man.”  I should probably find out who Edith Cavell was, if she’s going to go around saying extraordinary things like that.

Still annoyed at the lack of organization at the British Museum, I go straight for the audio guide and Gallery One, which begins it all with the Tudors.  I meet my friend Hans Holbein^[1] again, and take in the really amazing portraits he did of Henry VIII, Sir Thomas Moore (who taught me, via A Man For All Seasons, that it was possible to be just as big of a pain in the ass by being very, very good as it was by being bad, thus opening up many possibilities for me in life) and Cardinal Wosley.  There are some gangs of school children about, being quizzed by their teacher:

Teacher: (Pointing to a full length portrait of Queen Elizabeth in her youth, red hair aflame) Who’s that lady there?

Children:  Queen Elizabeth!

Teacher:  And what was she famous for?

Children:  She was the Queen!

Teacher:  And what about this man?

Children: Francis Drake!

Teacher:  And what did he do?

Children:  Sailed ‘round the world!

Teacher:  And who’s that fellow over there?

Children:  Sir Walter Raleigh!

Teacher:  And what was he famous for?

Children:  Cigarettes!

There was also a lot of amusement when these children encountered a portrait of Sir Francis Bacon, the comedic aspect of having cured breakfast meat for a last name more than apparent to them.  I find myself comparing the portraits of people on the wall to what they looked like in the Hollywood films that have been made of their lives.  I have to give whoever does the casting for HBO credit for how much the Earl of Southampton in their mini-series on Queen Elizabeth looked like his portrait in the National Gallery.

 After the Tudors I lose interest in both the portraiture style and the subjects.  It’s all painted in that Fwenchy Rococo style that I don’t like.  I dutifully look at all the portraits, but I don’t care about any of them.  It isn’t until the men start looking like George Washington (I now know this is called the “Regency” Period) that I begin to see familiar names again, particularly men of science, like Jenner and Faraday and Darwin.  Speaking of films, I find William Wilberforce, whose portrait is only partially finished, and next to him his friend, Pitt the Younger.  Wilberforce does not look particularly like the actor who played him in Amazing Grace, (Ion Gruffud) but Pitt the Younger does (Benedict Cumberbatch, I no longer wince at the tweeness of this name, as you can see). 

Placards tell me that this person’s or that person’s portrait “caused a sensation” or “raised ire” when it was hung.  Silly people, it’s just a picture, I thought.  Then I arrived at the modern portraits and after being lulled by nice paintings of Alan Bennett and David Hare and Tom Stoppard (all acceptable) I came upon one of Sienna Miller and really, I had an urge to rip it from the wall and smash it on the ground.  Some one please, please tell me why that woman is famous.  Similar reactions to Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson and the vile Anita Roddick.  Also all the cricketers and footballers who have portraits hanging – come on, National Portrait Gallery.  Have standards. 

I think the modern portraits I liked best were the ones circa the Bloomsbury era – Joyce and Wolfe and Strachey.  Quite a few were done by Dora Carrington, and I really liked them.  I didn’t see many portraits from the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties because that wing was blocked off – there were installing something.  I’ll have to be back, because I missed Wilde and Orton, whom I must see.  There was a whole wing devoted to Diana, from which I heard sobbing emanating, so from which I fled as quickly as possible when I discovered what it was, eyes squinted so I wouldn’t see any of it.  I escaped unscathed.  I didn’t mind Princess Di when she was alive – I thought she was pretty, I thought Prince Charles acted like an ass, it was awful how she died.  What I can’t stand is this carrying on ten years later.  She wasn’t Gandhi, people.  Get over it.^[2]

I eat lunch at the National Portrait Museum Café.  I should know better by now, but they had a ham and asparagus quiche that looked very nice, so I had that, with a coffee.  It was repulsively salty.^[3]  Also, I was really hurting.  All the stooping to read placards and inspect the art had taken its toll and my back was hurting in a place it had never hurt before – right in the middle – so I had to find something to do that didn’t have anything to do with a museum.  I got on the tube to Camden Town.

My trip to Camden has been a long time coming.  It starts back in college, where I became enamored of the British Diary, ostensibly private ephemera written so obviously to survive for posterity - a human contradiction that I loved.  In medical school I read Alan Bennett’s diary and discovered The Lady in the Van.  The Lady in question was an elderly misfit who drove her station wagon into Alan Bennett’s driveway in Camden Town one day and lived out of it from there for decades.  Being British, he simply stepped around it every day.  He let her run an extension cord from his house out to the van, bought her groceries, and wrote about her in his diary.  He didn’t like her – she was a pain in his ass, her van stunk, and she would frighten the guests (he seemed to relish this, especially when she scared the shit out of Vincent Price) who came to his house.  She liked to put coats of yellow house paint on her car because it was a papal color and she was a devout Catholic^[4], so there were drips and draps of yellow paint everywhere.  Alan Bennett’s fairly famous, by the way.  He wrote the play The Madness of King George and got his start with the Beyond the Fringe comedy group, where his cohorts were Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.  Imagine a homeless guy taking up shop in Woody Allen’s vestibule. He'd call the police.  But Mr. Bennett just sort of bore this lady in his driveway the way you’d bear a bird’s nest in a tree on your property – a random act of nature, which he dealt with in a humane, patient and all together English way.  So in prep for my trip to London I reread the Lady in the Van parts of Bennett’s diary, trying to triangulate on exactly where his house was.  I narrowed it down to the house across the street from #63, Gloucester Crescent.  

I really couldn’t go back home without making this little personal pilgrimage, so I figured now was as good a time as any.  When I came up out of the tube, I found myself on Camden High Street, and it was quite a scene.  The streets were bustling with 20 year olds, every shop seemed like a place where you could either get a tattoo or a vegan meal, and anti war signs were plastered on every surface.  Unmistakable and comforting signs of a nearby University, I became quite enthused and was I was temporarily distracted from my pilgrimage by the temptation of a denim skirt with Che Guevara's visage silk screened onto its butt, which was for sale by a dreadlocked sidewalk vendor. It seemed very much like something I needed and I barely tore myself away.

Gloucester Crescent was quiet and residential.  Incredibly, I appeared to be the only person there on a pilgrimage to the yellow spots of paint on the curb outside Alan Bennett’s house.  I walked all the way up it and all the way down the road, taking it in.  The row houses were very nice – clearly, you’d have to have a lot of money to live in one.  I could see in through some of the windows and the insides were very luxe.  The street and the yards were very grungy and grimy, though – very Hyde Park, if you know what I mean.^[5]  I remembered the astonishment of my mother and father the first time we visited Hyde Park after I was at college – they couldn’t understand why educated, well paid people would live in such squalourous settings, where you had to keep one hand on your pocketbook at all times and everything you owned was covered in soot.  Needless to say, I felt right at home.  I found the faded yellow spots of paint, and rejoiced.

 

Walking back to my hotel it occurred to me that I hadn’t had anything warm to eat all day.  I stopped and looked in the window of an Indian Restaurant on Gloucester Road and the owner of it came out and basically pushed me inside.  I ordered some Samosas, Garlic Naan, and Saag Paneer.  The waiter was not happy with my order and wanted me to order some rice or some lentils.  I didn’t want any of those things; I just wanted my old standbys.  Another waiter stopped and asked me if I was Chinese or Japanese.  For Christ’s sake, even in England.^[7]  “Japanese,” I tell him, and he chatters some words at me which are truly incomprehensible.  I’m sorry – I know I don’t speak Japanese, but I can say hello, and how are you and all those things people might be taught as phrases.  I look at him in dumb confusion.  He chatters at me again in Indian-accented Japanese.  I have no idea whatsoever what he’s saying.  “Not Japanese,” he pronounces, and moves on, seriously pissing me off. 

The Japanese speaking Indian man arrives later with my Samosas.  “Very good with mint sauce,” he tells me, pointing to the tub of mint sauce and then my Samosas.  “Yes,” I say, but he’s whisked himself away.  I put some mint sauce on a side plate and dip my Samosa into it.  The waiter reappears at my elbow.  “Please, try the mint sauce, Madame,” he scolds.  Before I can show him that I am eating it with the mint sauce, he is gone.  Minutes later he reappears, picks up the tub of mint sauce and pours it himself onto my remaining Samosa, shaking his head in disgust.  I take out my notebook in order to write this extraordinary string of events down for later documentation, and immediately the service becomes rather amazingly better.  My main course arrives, accompanied by a “tasting plate, compliments of the Chef,” a sweet Mango Lassi that I didn’t order and I am asked what I would like, for free, for dessert.  At first I think maybe the owner saw how rude the waiter was, but as he’s allowed to go around and be rude to everyone else in the restaurant, I end up with the realization that with my notebook they think I am a restaurant reviewer.  So I am obliged to tell you that Memories of India in Gloucester Road is clean and bright, but the service is challenging and the food is mediocre.  It is hot and filling, though, and they give you stuff for free.

---

^[1] Because I have seen his iconic portraits of Henry VIII all my life, I took Holbein for granted at first.  I looked at the portrait and I saw Henry VIII, corpulent of flesh and ego.  But the more of Holbein’s work I see on this trip the more I start to look at these paintings and see not the queens and kings and noblemen but Holbein himself.  The paintings lack the dramatic spotlighted three-dimensional fleshiness of a Caravaggio, or a David.  They are flat, open, straightforward, powerful.  There is no allegory here.  Henry VIII doesn’t need allegory – he just needs to be, and that frankness is what Holbein captures in his subjects.  Most of the artists who mean a lot to me are more contemporary, but by the end of this trip I had developed a serious reverence for Sir Hans.

^[2] Stephen Frears’ The Queen explores the notion that the English Public’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana marks a moment during which everyone realized that the EP had in fact undergone a distinct change.  Gone were the stiff upper lips of the generation that had survived the Blitz and defeated the Nazis.  The EP was now soft, weepy, sentimental – American.  Oh, the horror.  I agree completely.  Buck up, English Public. 

^[3] The quiche, not the coffee.  Although I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been the other way around. English food is extremely dependable in its ability to revolt one’s tastebuds. Always Eat Ethnic in London – that’s my advice. 

^[4] And because she was crazy.

^[5] I speak here of Hyde Park, Chicago, the neighborhood that the University of Chicago is in.  It’s a small strip of lakefront land between two of the worst ghettos on Chicago’s south side (when Martin Luther King Jr spoke of Chicago’s “silver lined ghetto,” Hyde Park was the silver).  Having grown up there, most of Chicago is stamped with the identities of my parents, but Hyde Park belongs to me. 

^[7] No travel story of mine exists without at least one encounter that involves curiosity about my ethnicity.  This is a well-known fact.