Bennett Alan. Telling Tales

BBC Radio Collection
File size: 123 MB
In this delightful collection of reminiscences Alan Bennett recalls his early years in a sequence of tales that are funny, touching and written in his unique style. These beautifully rendered snapshots, which include poignant portraits of his parents, confirm Bennett at the forefront of contemporary writing. Presented here as a new edition, Telling Tales will delight Bennett fans and enchant a new generation of readers.
Being born in a northern town, Bennett tells us, is more like a handicap than an inheritance, with that 'incurable disease of the vowels' always lying in ambush. But only Bennett's intonation could make Aunt Eveline with her 'enormous bust' immediately recognisable as a Bennett aunt - along with the telling detail of the lace-bordered frontal that masks the 'dark and mossy chasm' of the cleavage which so fascinated the young child.
Poignant detail dancing between tragedy and comedy is Bennett's art. In his childhood home above his father's butcher's shop, the young Alan had to edge past the beef heads hanging in the cellar to get the coal. Upstairs, his mother sat by the iron range she had prettified with a flowered cretonne pelmet in a kitchen pervaded by the stench of dripping.
As a child, he was ashamed of his parents, and now he is ashamed of his youthful self but, Bennett muses after a deft pause in a low, tender voice, there is no one left from whom to ask forgiveness.
Where was life for this odd 14-year-old boy who prayed assiduously and took upon himself the nightly cleaning of his parents' false teeth neglected in the cup with no handle? Certainly not in Leeds, it seemed to Bennett at the time, but his Tales show that it was indeed there and its minutiae absorb him, and his listeners, still.