GETTING ON by ALAN BENNETT.
GEORGE
Are you sixty?
ENID
Sixty two dear. Yes, sixty two. I'm into the home stretch now. The coda. The run up to the springboard. Times up, come in No. 17. No, no, you want to say. Not me, Her. I haven't had a long enough turn. She started off ages before me. But that's where the management exercises its absolute discretion.
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GEORGE
When does it happen? When did I turn into this? This sagging cistern, lagged with an overcoat of flesh that gets thicker and thicker every year. The skin sags, the veins break down, more and more galleries are sealed off. And you never notice. There is no pain. No warning shots. No bells ring back at base to indicate that another sectioon of the front line has collapsed. This is the body that I live with and hoist into bed each night. I heave it desperately from place to place, dump it with less and less enthusiasm on someone elses body, then lug it off again, and go about my business, as a representative of the people. Save me, O God from the Car Wash and the lawnmower on Sundays, the steak house and the whisky a Go Go. Deliver me from leisure and salmon pink trousers. Give me the Roman virtues, O God. Dignity, Sobriety. And at the last, let not my heart be whisked across London preceded by fourteen police cars, sounding their klaxons, the transfer of my liver not be discussed by trendy surgeons (who consent willingly to make-up) on late night television programmes. May I die, as I have lived, just about in one piece and my carcass not be scavenged as soon as the breath can more or less be safely said to have left my body. Shovel me into the dustbin, O Lord, without reducing me to offal in some sterile and gleaming knackers yard. And make me a decent man, O God.
POLLY
Education didn't alter me one bit. Falling in love, sex, the children, they've altered me. I had a good education but it never went to my head, somehow. It should be a journey ending up with you at a different place. It didn't take with me. My degree was a kind of innoculation. I got just enough education to make me immune to it for the rest of my life. Now I couldn't tell you the first thing about Coleridge's inner landscape. All wasted.
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POLLY
Now Andy's talking about leaving school, doing something useful. I haven't dared tell George. What does it matter? It doesn't get you any further, education.
BRIAN
It's not designed to. Or rather it is designed to, and that's what's wrong with it. Or so George would say. We in the Conservative Party think exactly the opposite.
POLLY
I don't know what you think at all. You don't care much, do you?
BRIAN
Not much, no.
POLLY
And Parliament? That either?
BRIAN
Passes the time. Fills in that awkward gap between the cradle and the grave.
ANDY
Well, what did Parliament ever do. It never did much for me anyway.
GEORGE
It never did much for you...it brought you into the bloody world. You were born in 1953 in Charing Cross Hospital under the auspices of the National Health Service. The National Health Service, a phrase still capable of bringing a sly smile to people's faces. You shrug it off, the Welfare State, another sneering phrase. It's nothing to you. You've grown up with it, you were born under it. You take it for granted now. You don't remember the years when it was put together, at the desks of little men with bad teeth and terrible haircuts, runtish little civil servants who were born during the Depression, smoking too much in their cold government green offices in Nissen huts on bomb sites shivering through that winter of 1947 that went on until June. Hammering it out, clause by clause, section by irrelevant section. Food rationed, clothes rationed, coal rationed, working by candlelight in power cuts, left standing in the Tube by the hour together. Battering it out and forcing it through in the face of the Conservative Party, in the teeth of the medical profession, in the rotten nicotine stained teeth of half the nation, they got it through and laid the corner stone of a civilised life. And I glory in that. Snobbish, sceptical, sneering socialist that I am, I glory in that.
ANDY
Great days, Dad. Those were the days, Dad.
GEORGE
Socialist that I am I glory in it. And it was done, please note, not by kindness and benevolence, not by moist good friendship and rattling beads and tuning in to the universe. But by grit and thought and work. Back breaking, soul destroying ill tempered work ... Work that comes out of guilt and fear and want and all those phantoms your generation is very happy to be without. And you sit there with that stupid transcendental grin on your face and say it's irrelevant.
ANDY
Save it Dad. Save it for some other stupid sod. One of the ninety nine per cent. No point in wasting it on me. I'm one of the chosen. That's right, isn't it. Anyway, it's all relative.
GEORGE
What?
ANDY
It's all relative.
GEORGE
Which particular revolutionary handbook did you pick that one up from? Or is that Dave? It isn't all relative. Some things are absolute. Humbug is absolute. Rubbish is absolute. Sloppy sentimental and worthless. And waste. And it is a bloody waste. You'll end up like our friend upstairs, stripping wardrobes for a living ... Words fail me. They always do in the end. Worst method of communicating with anyone.
GEORGE
"It's autumn. Autumn. The start of term. The real beginning of the year. I've always kept terms, ever since I was five years old. Autumn when you moved up a class, changed teachers, got a new exercise book. New satchel, school socks. I even went into the army in September. And Oxford in October, trunks in the lodge, leaves down Parks Road. Track suits. And now Parliament again. Still in terms. There are people whose year begins with the Calendar. Begins, as Fleet Street decrees it should begin with travel brochures and sales in Oxford Street. How many? Most people I suppose. Wish class away there would still be this: we are two nations because our years have different bones. Terms are part of the crumbling skeleton of the Christian Year. Advent, annunciation, birth, passion and pentecost. Our year begins as theirs dies. Theirs...whose? The masses. The people. The voters. I was in America a year on scholarship. After Oxford. There were no terms there. It was time with the stays taken out of it, no rhythmn to the calendar, no Christian holidays, no Easter or Whitsuntide. A secular state. There were sudden holidays in the middle of nowhere. Like missing a step on the stair. Lincoln's birthday. Labour Day. Odd, capricious, unexpected. No system. No scheme. I like system. I like ceremony. I like pattern. Perhaps I am a Christian. Perhaps that's what's wrong with me. Or boredom.