A pocket sized book of not quite 100 pages, this is more short story than novel. But it is classic Alan Bennett. It is extremely British, very dry in its humour, ribald at times, and poignant too.
The setting is Hill Topp House, an old folks home, run by the redoubtable Mrs McBryde who is a class snob, threatening the residents who misbehave with demotion to Low Moor, the much lower class establishment down the hill, from Hill Topp.
“Mrs McBryde had had someone apply the previous week whose name was Charlene. Not a hope. As she said to Zulema, the Charlenes of this world belong in Low Moor” (p190
. Mrs McBryde would have you note that it is “Hill Topp with two p’s” (p8).
When Mrs Foss applies to live at Hill Topp,
“when Mrs Foss’s letter let fall that her name was Amelia, she sailed past several earlier candidates on her name alone” (p19).
Everyone there is made a character, or caricature. There is the boastful, pushy Woodruff, who is a serial flasher; Gus the window cleaner who provides sex services to 4 of the women and one of the men of Hill Topp in the bike shed. As Bennett, tapping into a well worn stereotype of British sitcom slyly puts it,
“Far from young himself, Gus was a not atypical member of his profession and thus alert to chance encounters” (p44)
There’s Miss Rathbone with her jigsaws, and Gloria with her long hair, and Phyllis with her knitting. It is a depiction to both warm the heart and also drive one to suicidal urges with its deliberate banality which the comedy underlines with a heavy hand.
“Things often went missing at Hill Topp and then there were disagreements that were no less bitter for being over trifles. […] Rather than acknowledge that their disappearance might be to due to absent-mindedness, the old people jumped gratifyingly to the conclusion that they had been robbed, and as often as not by their friend and neighbours. […] Private tiffs, simmering disagreements although mitigated to some degree by failing memory. They quarrelled but forgot who with” (p46-7).
Covid strikes, the residents of Hill Topp are more able to socially distance than Low Moor residents, and so fewer die. They potter on, somehow, even when administrator and cleaner are lost to them. They make a break for freedom, of sorts,
“the surviving denizens of Hill Topp seized their moment and for what little time may be left to them they frolicked” (p89)
They build a bonfire, go ‘chumping’ – scavenging for anything they can burn, including furniture, possessions of the deceased, anything flammable. A few more die, Miss Rathbone at the end, with the revelation of what she had been before, to strike that last note of futility and loss and also of grace. Really, one reads Bennett not for the plot of course, but for the language, the way he wields the words, with deliberate elegance, with deliberate coarseness, to seduce, to shock, always to delight.
Killing Time
Alan Bennett
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