Free Writing Home by Alan Bennett

years of age as a Scout – a Caledonian, you know. A sword dance, with crossed swords. Aye, Ged, you can do that when you’re twelve, but you daren’t do it when you’re fourteen.
    OLD LADY: I’ve been here when I was twelve.
    OLD MAN: It’s a funny thing this puberty business when you think of it, isn’t it?
    ( Music. The Crown Bar .)
    Puberty long since behind them, the nicely-off members of the Boston Spa Tennis Club have said farewell to embarrassment and are whooping it up at their annual disco. Never havingbeen able to dance, watching it generally fills me with envy and melancholy; but all this disco does is to convince me of the ultimate charms of the Zimmer frame.
    ( Exterior of hotel Night .)
    RECEPTIONIST: Reception, can I help you?
Yes, you can have both English and Continental in your room, if you just put the card that’s on your bed, if you put it on the door, and the night porter will pick it up in the night for you and then we’ll have your breakfast there in the morning. All right?
    ( Dining-room .)
    The pound is twitching this morning, the radio says, but it doesn’t seem to be upsetting the business appetite. Breakfast as a meal never occurred in our house, and with our motto of ‘Let’s pretend we’re like everyone else’ this was another fact we concealed from the outside world. We imagined that every family except us sat down together to a cooked breakfast – an assumption a hotel seems to confirm.
    It lives on as a myth in television commercials, but I can’t think anybody’s taken in. Still, it’s the business of hotels to be one step behind the times – hotels, like colonies, keeping up a way of life that is already outmoded.
    ( A chambermaid in the corridor .)
    Beverley goes hoover hoover outside the day’s first meeting – this time a meeting about how to hold meetings.
    ( Melbourne Room .)
    LECTURER: The discipline of the meeting is very important, and I’m sure that most of you have had an enormous amount of experience when thinking of some of the meetings that you’ve had and … that lackof discipline has caused a considerable waste of time. The person has got to have the ability to be able to present himself, he’s got to be competent and present the … the company.
OK, any more … any more questions?
    ( Lobby .)
    Meanwhile, the lobby swarms with amateur gardeners off to the Harrogate Flower Show. Hobbies were another thing our family never managed. Dad played the violin and Mam went through a lampshade-making phase, but nothing ever got them in its teeth, not like these nice, gentle people; they are fanatics. ‘In the context of ground cover, dare one mention the humble myosotis?’, and off go the gardeners to the flower show. Lucky them!
    ( Melbourne Room .)
    LECTURER: … may well be the same people who supervise the doing of the work …
    But no truants among the businessmen, who have another lesson before playtime.
    LECTURER: An owner who starts his own company may well clear his dining-room table in the evening and do this part – and to a great extent this as well. In all sorts of ways companies operate in different means. As we get bigger, of course, we have establishments, we have departments, we may even have office blocks of people who are doing that.
    Oddly touching I find these middle-aged schoolboys – still wanting to learn, still convinced they can do it better, wives left at home, whom they’ll go up and phone later to tell them how well their group did in the test.

    LECTURER: … and in fact what we ought to be doing is dead simple – just keep taking pound notes from people and keep them smiling as you do it. It’s as simple as that.
    ( Brontë Bar .)
    TOASTMASTER: Hello sir, Mr Mayor.
Hello, Lady Mayoress. How are you?
    MAYORESS: Fine, thank you.
    GUEST: Good. Drinks are here, are they?
    The Flower Show Committee are having drinks in the Brontë Bar, flowers flushing out a lot of what my mother would call ‘the better class’.
    GUEST: …