The Lady in the Van turns the raw material of fact into fiction and back again
The film, previously a stage play, originated in Alan Bennett’s annual Diary in the London Review of Books, a caustic and often hilarious selection of the highlights of his past year, which, even when read on the page, recalls Bennett’s mournful, deadpan Leeds-accented voice.
Diary, play and film are based on the true story of Miss Shepherd, an elderly lady who parked the van she lived in in Alan Bennett’s driveway in Camden Town’s Gloucester Crescent in 1974 as a temporary measure, and stayed there until her death in 1989 — 15 long years for her reluctant host.
This beautiful little book contains a foreword by Nicholas Hytner, the director of the film, an introduction and diary of the location filming in 2014 by Alan Bennett, the original 45-page memoir, and the screenplay, all accompanied by sketches by veteran artist David Gentleman, and colour photographs by Antony Crolla. It is not unlike a hardback version of the souvenir programme you’d buy at the theatre.
But this is also a thought-provoking demonstration of how the raw material of life gets turned into fiction: what is added and what is taken away, how reality is crafted to form a satisfying work of art.
Or, as the director Nicholas Hytner puts it: ‘It is also about what a writer must do with what happens in front of his nose to turn it into a story worth telling.’
In the film script, Alan Bennett is divided into two characters, Alan Bennett the writer, who stay at his desk and makes notes, and AB, who leaves the study and lives a real life.
Alan Bennett plays down his own kindness and generosity, insisting that his tolerance of Miss Shepherd was not due to innate kindness or his ‘caring nature’ (an expression he loathes), but came about from a combination of selfishness and inertia.
When her van was parked in the street outside his house, it was directly in his line of view while working, and the continual pestering of Miss Shepherd by local louts was a distraction.
Nor did he put up with her because he cared for her in any way: ‘With me, kindness was never less kindly nor caring so uncaring with exasperation and self-reproach so often the order of the day.’
One of the most poignant aspects of the film script is the parallel story of Bennett’s own mother’s decline, moving from her terraced house in Leeds into a nursing home, and from a relatively active life to being bedridden and barely conscious.
At home he observes Miss Shepherd, right there on his doorstep as she becomes ever more eccentric, smelly and physically disabled, while up in Leeds his mother is living alone through her final years, and he cannot effectively help either of them.
His mother is not mentioned in the original memoir, and Miss Shepherd’s exotic past as a concert pianist is a fiction: the writer both suppresses facts, and invents fictions.
The most absorbing aspect of this compilation is the light it sheds on Bennett’s technical expertise.
The memoir, published only after Miss Shepherd’s death, culled from 15 years of diary writing, is a beautifully economic piece of work, not a word in excess and not a word in the wrong place.
The film script is also a model of its kind, with its quirky scene-setting, taut dialogue and carefully-honed plot.
Like many consummate professionals, Alan Bennett makes it all look so easy, while it is, of course, the product of years of discipline and hard work.
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