Review of “Killing Time” by Alan Bennett – a cut higher | fiction

bIn 2020, with the country in lockdown, the BBC commissioned updated versions of Alan Bennett's completed Talking Heads, originally broadcast in 1988. Ten of the twelve monologues have been remade with a new A-list of British actors, including Kristin Scott Thomas and Lesley Manville, and Martin Freeman takes on roles first played by Eileen Atkins, Maggie Smith and Bennett herself. Only two, “A Cream Cracker Under the Sofa” and “Waiting for the Telegram,” both with the late, great Thora Hird, were not repeated. The omission was necessitated by BBC social distancing rules: during the pandemic, directors were banned from working with actors from high-risk groups, including those over 70.

Bennett wrote two new monologues to replace the missing pieces, one for Sarah Lancashire and one for Monica Dolan, and they were very good too, but Killing Time is proof that the characters he wrote for Thora Hird remained very memorable to him. In a cream cracker under the sofa Fiercely independent Doris is determined never to end up in Stafford House retirement home, a fate that is constantly threatened by Zulema, the slovenly housekeeper assigned to her by social services. “You’re stupid,” says Doris vehemently. “There’s nowhere else to go but bullshit.”

Now, more than 30 years later, Doris' Zulema is back, cleaning up mincemeat and shaking off racism as a carer at Hill Topp House, a social home and the setting for Killing Time. Hill Topp (“In case of correspondence, please note that it is Topp with two Ps,” emphasizes the relentlessly genteel owner) is, in Bennett parlance, a step up and highly sought after: for an additional charge on top of the fees, the Hill Top offer Residents benefit from “a choir and on special occasions a glass of dry sherry…just last week we went to a local farm where there is a flamingo”.

Mostly, however, the older residents play puzzles, knit, and eat Angel Delight. They compete for better bedrooms that have their own sinks. The handyman offers sexual services to a rotating clientele of both sexes in the lawnmower shed for a symbolic sum (“That's such a nice change from the humbug”), while Mr. Woodruff, the oldest resident, distracts himself with therapeutic flashing and has a firm opinion that “since this made his heart beat faster, this should be encouraged”. Despite the fleeting mention of iPads, Hill Topp House has a distinct 1970s feel. There is also an ongoing low hum, particularly among the less affluent residents who fear that some misdemeanor or lack of money might see them demoted to neighboring Low Moor, an altogether less wholesome and not at all desirable establishment. Life, as Mr. Woodruff ruefully notes, was “snakes and ladders.”

Bennett is in his element in such an establishment, attuned to both the dark anxieties of old age and its terrible comedy, shifting deftly between the two. It's familiar territory, but no one does it as well as he does. Teeth and wigs are lost. This also applies to memories and conversation threads. “It’s the same as ours,” says one resident caustically. “We are all lost property now.”

The plot is as thin as the book itself. An elderly resident, Violet, dies. (Violet was also the name of Thora Hird's ninety-year-old character in Waiting for a Telegram.) Another woman moves in to take Violet's place. She organizes a flea market to raise money for the house. The residents talk inconsequential and contradictory. And then Covid comes and Hill Topp House is turned upside down. The failure to protect elderly nursing home residents has been one of the pandemic's great scandals, but Bennett approaches the horror obliquely. The virus inevitably brings death, but it also brings liberation, freeing residents from the constraints of ordered days and oppressive gentility. “They were fooling around,” Bennett observes approvingly. “When the arthritis allowed it, they ran away.” Covid was miserable, he admits, but when death approaches and waiting is all that's left, perhaps going quietly into that good night is the need is the greatest misery of all.

Even at 90 years old, Bennett wrote in his pandemic diary House Arrest about how he mangled his words at the health center for his own Covid vaccination and announced that he was there because of his virus (“unfortunately, both the disease and that.” Remedies begin with av”). When written down, his sentences remain as devastating and casually precise as ever. However, and not without good reason, he seems like a man who is in a hurry. Occasionally Killing Time feels more like the notes of a novel than a novella itself, the dialogue is as sparse as a screenplay. You miss the actors who would slow down and flesh out the film. The second half in particular scurries like a Hill Topp pensioner and gallops towards the end of the story. However, since this is Bennett, this conclusion manages to touch the heart quietly, ironically and without the slightest trace of sentimentality.