Talking Heads by Alan Bennett
This is number five in my 100 + Reading Challenge. I adore these monologues by Alan Bennett. I picked up this book at a jumble sale in the Peak District about six years ago and it is a cherished bookshelf fixture.
Bennett’s monologues – performed for the BBC series by great British actors including Thora Hird, Julie Walters and Patricia Routledge – are funny, disturbing, sad and ovewhelmingly poignant.
My favourte is “Cream Cracker Under the Settee” where Doris’s obsessive cleaning leads to her demise – she is cleaning when she shouldn’t be and slips and falls on the floor. She is one of these prideful old women. The “stiff upper lip” generation of Brits who don’t want to make a fuss. Behind the stubborness is real sadness too. The comment about the stillbirth of her baby son are words that have stayed somewhere in my mind ever since I read them: “…the midwife said he wasn’t fit to be called anything and had we any newspaper?…I wanted to see him. Wrapping him in newspaper as if he was dirty…”
February 8, 2010
Posted in: 100+ reading challenge 2010
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