My forebears are English and, although our family had lived in New Zealand for almost a century by the time I was born, throughout my childhood my grandparents and parents referred to the UK as home. Whichever, my reading habits and my preoccupations moved to other matters and Alan Bennett dropped off my list.īut for a while, Bennett’s books were like a bridge into a world of might have beens. Like a friendship that grows distant, it’s difficult to say who was the first to step away. And then after the release of the very funny The Uncommon Reader, I changed. The collections Writing Home and Untold Stories, the play The History Boys, the movie The Madness of King George were amongst my favourites for years. (Of course the very notion of a front parlour is quintessentially British and colonial, perhaps.) In doing so I observed a way of life that was oddly familiar and yet simultaneously very different from my own in what the British like to call The Antipodes, but for me is Aotearoa-home.īennett’s politics, his antipathy to all things Thatcher, his pre-occupation with education and fairness and a decent life for everyone, and his warmth, his regard for the ordinary person sit well with me. From my place in the world, Down Under, reading Bennett was like peering through a window into a neighbour’s front parlour. There was a time when I read Alan Bennett‘s books regularly. This month it’s not a book but a short story, The Lady in The Van by Alan Bennett.
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