Without childhood traumas, how did Alan Bennett ever become a writer?

‘So — take heart,’ said Alan Bennett, sending us out from his play, Cocktail Sticks, on a cheery note. The treatment for cancer had been gruelling, but that was 15 years ago, so…

This Radio 4 production was adapted (and produced) by Gordon House from the stage version at the National Theatre but was perfectly made for radio, a monologue interrupted by dramatic scenes that take us back into Bennett’s childhood. Why, he wonders, is there nothing from that past for him to write about — no trauma, no deprivation, no disappointment? Surely, his parents could have done more to help him become a writer?

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With anyone else this would have sounded so trite and superficial, uncaring even, the typical writer turning over his own life, his own family for commercial gain. But with Bennett it becomes masterful, each fragment of memory telling us something not so much about his life as about the blanks in our own half-formed reflections.