It is no exaggeration to say that Alan Bennett has played a large part in shaping our national psyche. As the writer of The History Boys, The Lady in the Van, The Madness of King George, Talking Heads and much, much more, it is hard to imagine the UK without him. Now 90 years old, he’s a national treasure, yes, but the cosiness of the term belies the content of his work; his outwardly restrained characters grapple with torments of class, sex, and perhaps most of all, solitude.
His latest book, Killing Time, is a novella set in a care home during the outbreak of the Covid , but it is not his first pandemic publication; his lockdown diary House Arrest was a bestseller. Ageing and death have long fascinated Bennett. In BBC One’s 1987 one-act play A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, we watched the elderly Doris contemplate her demise, while his 2018 play Allelujah! was set on a geriatric ward.
In his new novella, we meet the residents of the Hill Topp care home, whose mortality is similarly imminent. These residents include Gladys, the beauty, whose hair has never been cut, “a grand suburban sphinx”; and Woodruff, who likes to flash his penis, even though his plastic incontinence sheath means that locating it involves “a degree of delving”. When fellow resident Mrs Vokes dies, Woodruff convinces the vicar that he should press the button that sends her coffin through the final curtains.
In a typically Bennet touch, Woodruff then presses the button adjacent, fetching it b.
