A Postillion Struck by Lightning (39 page)

One morning while I was out “shopping” for props for the next production (we used to go and beg and borrow anything from a grand piano to a patchwork quilt from the generous people in the neighbourhood) a telephone message arrived at the theatre asking me to call Q Theatre urgently. Feeling, I don't know why, that the message might be private and not wanting it to be heard all over the Box Office, unlike the Engagement Announcement, I went up to a call box at the station and called Q. Beattie was very calm, almost disinterested.

“They want to take the Priestley play into the West End. You know, the one you did here last season. ‘Cornelius'. They
want to know if you are available. I said I'd find out, dear. You'd have to start next week of course.”

I walked down the hill to the converted grocer's shop in a trance and asked Sally Latimer if she would release me from the Company, which, after a sour look and some understandable grumbles, she finally agreed to do. Annie was delighted but somewhat wistful. “Oh dear!” she said. “It's just like the flicks, isn't it? Where they want one half of the act and not the other…” But I was beyond subtleties of this kind. I had already packed the green suit, my washing bag and a “good” pair of black shoes I had pinched from the theatre wardrobe, and as far as I was concerned had already opened in the play and caused a sensation.

Bill Wightman got me a room in his lodgings in Fellows Road. His landlady offered me the one hot meal at night, a bed under the stairs on the second floor, and said she didn't normally take actors but would make an exception because Mr Wightman had recommended me strongly. She asked for ten shillings a week, and to my astonishment, I agreed.

Miss Hanney was bossy, curious, and kind. All her lodgers, there were six of us, were “professional” gentlemen, she said, that is to say they were Lawyers, Accountants or men who were “good at figures”. We all sat down together, on the bong of a gong, at one big table in the front room and were served a meal of thin soup, meat and two veg, and cabinet, suet, or treacle, pudding. No one spoke much, and the only sound was the clink and clonk of the knives and forks against thick china. But I ate heartily for my daily diet was still much as it had been at Q—supplemented now and then by a sandwich in a pub or a hard-boiled egg.

The rehearsals started in the green room of the Westminster Theatre and, although I had played it at the Q and at the Embassy, it became startlingly clear that while I might have been tremendously enthusiastic about my performance no one seemed to be in the West End. It was not, it was felt, quite up to West End standards—and for a time it appeared that I would be given the sack. And, indeed, I would have been, had it not been for the great efforts of Ann Wilton, who had played with me at Q and felt that I did have a “spark”, as she called it.

Patiently, every day at the Lunch Break, she coached me all
alone in the Green Room, encouraging me, forcing me to project, to move, even to think, listen, and time a line. She knew, as I dimly did myself, that On The Night I'd be all right. But I was holding back too much at rehearsals and no one, except herself, had the least idea of what I might possibly do. She told me bluntly that I was to be re-cast, and begged me to try harder than ever. I did. And with her help and patience finally won through.

My agonies were not unnoticed by everyone in the Company. Sometimes one of the student actors from the Mask Theatre School, who had a small part in the play, came timidly down into the Green Room and sat in the corner watching Ann's desperate efforts to force me into “attack” … he was a pale, tall, blond boy with anxious blue eyes: his own shyness was so great that he too, under the irritable eyes of our director, Henry Cass, was starting to wilt and was also in danger of getting sacked. So we were both in the same boat, except that I was in a far more unpleasant position, for at least I was supposed to be a Professional Actor already, and he merely a Student. Our mutual dilemma brought us close together and although he did all that he could to breach his shyness and reserve, Paul Scofield was eventually replaced while I, thanks entirely to Ann Wilton's supreme belief and care, was coached through the whole of the rehearsals until our modestly triumphant opening on August the 24th, 1940.

If Ann Wilton taught me two of the most important lessons in the Theatre, devotion and dedication, Max Adrian, who was also in the play, taught me quite another. But not less essential or timely. Humility. Overimpressed with my modest notices in the Daily Press, and well aware that the audiences not only liked me but thought I was funny, I started, within a very few performances to attempt to take over the play from the Principals. I mugged about, invented bits of, I thought, irresistible business, extended my laughs and behaved as if I was a one-man show at the Palladium. One matinee, unable to bear my behaviour any longer, Max, who played a humbled, timid little clerk, took up a great leather ledger and brought it crashing down on my totally unsuspecting head with an infuriated cry of “Never do that again, I say!” Bewildered with the suddenness of the blow, the stars literally reeling about my head, I slammed into a wall and slid, winded and stunned, to the stage amidst the largest roar of delighted laughter I had ever heard in a theatre in my life. At my own expense. A salutary and necessary lesson for which I was ever grateful.

The sirens went between the shows on the following Saturday. Just before the Second House. We all excitedly clambered up to the roof and looked across the rooftops mellow in the evening sun. Far away down the river the sky was peppered with little puffs of smoke; the rattle of guns and the drone of planes carried clearly through the traffic from the street below. The All Clear had not sounded by the time the curtain rose, and by the end of the first act it was impossible to continue for the noise outside. Stephen Murray, who was playing the lead, interrupted the performance, went to the edge of the stage, and told a sparse audience that if they wished we would continue the play or else they could leave, have their money back, and we would ring down the curtain. The play continued. To our astonishment we realised that the roof above the stage was entirely made of glass through which the steadily burning sky of London was reflecting with a carmine glow. At the end of the play the audience were asked if they wished to come below to share our Shelters, great caves below the theatre which were once supposed to be Henry VIII's Wine Cellars. Crouched together, audience and Cast and one large Alsatian dog which someone had brought with them, we sat through the long night, miserable, hungry, and very aware that the war had really started at last. It was, in a strange way, almost a relief. But start it had: and the next day, after the night's toll was known, everything closed down again, and the War took charge of our lives. “Cornelius”, along with many other shows, folded for good, and I was once again back where I had started, with an ever diminishing area of opportunities.

Lying in my small bed under the stairs in Fellows Road, feeling the house shake and tremble with every near miss, I decided that it might be wiser to swallow my pride and see if Amersham would have me back: it was in the country, Annie was still there, and all told I had only been away from them for about six weeks. When my window blew in and the door slammed itself out of the room across the mahogany banisters I decided that there was no time like the present. And as soon as it was light I walked to Baker Street and got the Metropolitan Line to Amersham on the Hill.

Sally Latimer took me back. Juveniles were getting harder and harder to find, and although I was so to speak Under Sentence,
I was better than nothing. I remember that at the bottom of every programme it was stated that: “All The Actors In This Production Are Either Unfit For Military Service Or Awaiting Call Up”, which made us all feel a bit second-hand. However it did stop the occasional complaining letter from patriotic Townspeople.

Annie was delighted to see me and behaved as if I had come back from Dunkirk rather than Swiss Cottage. So far the war had not touched Amersham very much: a string of bombs had fallen in an orchard up at Little Chalfont, and at nights the sky in the north east was scarlet with the flaring glow of burning London. But otherwise everything was relatively peaceful and we played to packed houses every night. I started with Caryl Jenner on the sets for “You Never Can Tell” and Bill Wightman, who had failed in his effort to purchase the Rep from a reluctant and determined Sally, came down to play The Waiter while I played McComus in a white wig and a mass of Leichner Carmine wrinkles which gave me the appearance of something between badly laid crazy-paving and a vicious razor attack.

My money had been raised to two pounds five shillings a week and I moved out of “Beechcroft” to an ugly bungalow in the White Lion Road where I slept in a bleak little front parlour on a camp bed surrounded by framed passe-partout signed photographs of Claude Dampier, Gillie Potter, The Crazy Gang, and George Lacy as The Dame in “Mother Goose”. My pleasant new Landlady had clearly been on The Boards herself.

All this, of course, was in order to be a little nearer to Annie in her digs under the pollarded oak by the Recreation Fields. Our “Romance” was becoming something of a strain, since we found it almost impossible to be on our own anywhere. I volunteered to be on almost constant duty as a Fire Watcher for the theatre, which meant that I spent the whole night in the Green Room waiting for Incendiaries to obliterate us and Annie to arrive with a Thermos of coffee, a quart of beer and a cold meat stew which we warmed up on the electric fire and ate off “prop” plates with “prop” spoons and forks. Hardly a conducive setting for Romance, and it was not altogether satisfactory. Neither were our performances on the following days. Wan and hollow-eyed, we blundered about the stage—until Sally decided to alter the Roster and insisted, rightly, that we rested for the Theatre's sake.

After “You Never Can Tell” it was agreed that a change of pace was needed and that we should “do” a Revue. Everyone went
to with a will and we wrote sketches and songs and pinched other people's material disgracefully, opening with a rousing number which was called “Joan of Arc” and was, we all felt, very topical. Dressed in black berets and raincoats, for some reason best known to ourselves, and set against the wobbly backcloth of a white Eiffel Tower and a vaguely inaccurate Notre Dame which I had painted all by myself, we sang the opening bars of our Song, which went, as far as I can remember like this…

“We can hear you calling,
Joan of Arc,
Over the Sea,
Out of the dark,
To the Land of the Freeee …”

Perfidious Albion all right. It made everyone feel very sad, and was hardly a rousing opening for an Intimate Revue … nevertheless we were a success and even toured it on Sundays, when the theatre was closed, round various army camps and hospitals all over Buckinghamshire. It was patriotic, exhausting, self-indulgent, and Always Applauded. I wrote a supposedly hilarious sketch for Annie and myself called “Doon the Watter” which was to accommodate our hardly ever used Glasgow accents, and she did a rather violent Clog Dance to the “Petticoat Song” from “Miss Hook Of Holland”. There were sketches and blackouts, and a plump girl from Rickmansworth did a thoughtful dance with a long cigarette holder to a scratchy recording of “Rhapsody in Blue”. At the end the entire company assembled with many outstretched hands and wide-flung arms to a passionate rendering of “We'll Meet Again”. Oh dear. Oh dear. But we all thought we were splendid. Perhaps we were.

After the Revue a change of pace again and a turgid piece called “Grief Goes Over”. All I can remember is that my wife died with her baby, or having it, I can't recall, and that I was comforted, in a long sad Third Act by my mother, played by Miss Latimer herself in a fur coat and a Herbert Johnson hat, in which I was able to indulge myself in some pretty hefty masculine sobbing, wearing my father's tails borrowed for the occasion. I must admit that though I cannot remember the play I do remember thinking that I looked pretty fine in Tails, though they did not fit and Anne had to pin them together with safety-pins. The fact that I looked like a Cypriot waiter totally escaped me and
I enjoyed myself nightly giving a performance of self-indulgence which would have made a Fire Eater blush. However, our sad little play was not popular, and the last Saturday night, much to my sorrow, was sparsely attended. There were a good many empty seats scattered about which, as it turned out, was just as well for me.