Poetry: "Untold Stories" By Alan Bennett ‖ Tom Hiddleston ‖ Words and Music: Memory

This is the excerpt from Untold Stories that Tom Hiddleston reads as part of the Memory episode of Words and Music on BBC Radio 3. The book is called Untold Stories and this quote is drawn from the piece with the same title, toward the end:

The strip lights go on this winter afternoon and I get ready to leave.

I never come away but I think that this may be the last time I shall see her, and it’s almost a superstition therefore that before I leave I should make eye contact with her. It’s sometimes for the first time as she can spend the whole hour not looking at me or not seeing me if she does. Kissing does not make her see me nor stroking her hand. A loud shout may do so, though, and certainly if I were to squeeze her arm or cause her pain she would look at me then or even cry out. Otherwise, there is a settled indifference to my presence.

To make her see me is not easy. Sometimes it means bringing my head down, my cheek on the coverlet in order to intercept her eye line and obtrude her gaze. In this absurd position, my head virtually in her lap, I say, ‘Goodbye, Mam, Goodbye,’…If this produces no satisfactory epiphany (a widening of the eyes, say, or a bit of a smile) I do it again, the spectacle of this middle-aged man knelt down with his head flat on the bed of no more interest to the other old women than it is to my mother.

Getting no response, I kiss her and go to the door, looking back for what I always think will be the last time. What I want to see is her gazing lovingly after me, her eyes brimming with tears or even just looking. But she has not noticed I’ve gone, and I might never have been in the room at all. I walk to the station.

'You have given the best,’ says a hoarding advertising another home, 'now receive the best.’ And in a film faintly would come the sound of the geriatric Horst Wessel, that sad and mendacious anthem, 'I am H-A-P-P-Y.’

Alan Bennett - Untold Stories.

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Source: "Words and Music: Memory", BBC Radio 3. Originally Aired: Sun 22 Feb 2015
"A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors."
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