Black Beech and Honeydew (17 page)

‘Good morning, Mrs Jack.’

‘Good morning, Mr Jack.’

‘Good morning, Miss Hope.’

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

Mr Wilkie took it again and again, insisting on a specific cadence. It was wonderful to see how it took shape and suddenly became as satisfying as a Mozartian interchange of voices. I had seen my mother working like this at rehearsals but not with the knowledgeable support of everybody else on the stage. Thus, I discovered how actors must listen to the dramatic shape of sound. When, in after years, I became a producer and when, at last, the plays I directed were Shakespeare’s, I remembered, most clearly of all the lessons I had been given, this commonplace exchange of ‘Good mornings’ and how the final word had fallen so sweetly and justly into its appointed resolution.

If I gave a tolerably good account of myself in this play, I made an astonishing hash of my role in
The Rotters,
a Maltby farce that was as acidulous as it was funny. Again it was a third act appearance but this time as a weather-beaten harridan of sixty. I lined my face like a gridiron, I padded, I shrieked, but all to no avail. The performance was a vain mockery and I knew it. Luckily it was confined to a single scene but the entrance was important and climactic and I hated making such a botch of it. But still I learned. I learned that the techniques for farce were unlike and in many ways more exacting than for those of comedy, that the timing of a laugh-line was a most delicate matter of finesse, that an actor could score better by alighting on a point than by clambering up to it. I saw that the open-handed action carrying
The Luck of the Navy
through its
Boys’ Own Paper
situations, needed an entirely different treatment from that of either of the Maltby plays. And when we came to rehearse
Hindle Wakes
for the newcomers in the company: here was a fourth and marked difference – that of the
genre
play with its dialect, for which Mr Wilkie was a stickler, and its harsh regional attitudes. I had a tiny bit – another maid – in this admirable and, at that time, daringly outspoken piece. In the course of playing it I made yet another discovery. A minimal, a half-minute scene with Mr Wilkie, the overbearing
mill-owner, ended when he turned his back and dismissed me with a short ‘Good night’. After one or two performances it occurred to me to smile when I replied ‘Good night, sir’, and there was a murmur, like a reflection, from the house. One may learn much from bit parts in the theatre.

‘What did you do on your exit line?’

‘I – I think I smiled.’

Mr Wilkie made the sound that is written ‘Humph’. After a hazardous pause he said: ‘Building your mighty role up, I suppose,’ and walked away.

‘Only I,’ he remarked on another occasion, ‘am at liberty to take six-foot strides on this stage.’

I hobbled my legs above the knees with a stocking.

I didn’t get off so lightly on the dreadful night when, the offstage area being cold, I wore an overcoat and left it across a chair while I was on. Mr Wilkie had a quick change into a dressing gown which was carefully laid out for him. During the blackout I heard a stream of shattering profanity. He had put on my overcoat.

I apologized at the end of the show. By that time the edge of his fury had a little blunted. I think he said something about being trussed up like a sacrificial rooster.

The Christchurch season came to its end. Our family friendship with the Wilkies had ripened. Mr Wilkie had been shown Kean’s coat and had made a cautious attempt to fit his arms in the sleeves which did not reach his elbows. He had also been shown Gramp’s book and asked to see it on each successive visit. On Sundays we had taken long walks on the hills, returning to our house for an improvised supper. Jack Castle-Morris had come to tea. The dates for the tour were posted up and I began rapturously to smother my luggage with the white and red labels of the Allan Wilkie Company.

I had never been out of the South Island. At seven o’clock on a blustery evening I attended my first train call as an actress. We had our own carriage. To reach Lyttelton one passed through our Port Hills by the longest and smokiest tunnel in New Zealand.

Our head mechanist arrived at the last minute, extremely drunk. He sat opposite me and turned out to be in the oncoming stage of his cups. Nothing could illustrate more precisely the difference between young persons of that generation and this than the circumstance of
his being the first inebriate with whom I experienced a personal encounter and nothing could point more exactly the social attitudes of the actors in this old-fashioned company than the immediate intervention of two who happened to be at hand. A ‘young girl’ was placed between inverted commas in the theatre of those days. She was ‘sweet’ by definition and without irony, the word being used in its Elizabethan sense. I really don’t think she was any the smugger for this rather nauseating addition. The adjective was understood if not specifically attached and when, as now, the occasion arose, her status was protected. If she chose to relinquish her sweetness she moved, I imagine, into another category.

I was much too excited to be more than momentarily perturbed by this incident. The train emerged from its tunnel into the port and there were ships riding at anchor with lights along their decks and mastheads moving against the stars. Cranes made wide, grandiloquent gestures, sailors leaned over taffrails and winches rattled. The train ran past a murky little station and then back down the wharves until we were alongside the night ferry to the North Island.

To me she looked enormous. Her tiers of portholes glowed, there were cars on her afterdeck and white-coated stewards at the gangways. An offshore wind blew strongly in our faces as we went aboard and then was lost in the hot rubber-and-soup smell of the ship’s inside.

I was to share a cabin with Vera St John and I had the top bunk. I left my suitcase and went up on deck. The port withdrew into itself and became a lonely arrangement of lights with an illuminated sign, ‘Lane’s Emulsion’, standing on the cliff-face above them. A lamp at the end of a mole slid past. The ship moved under my feet and the night wind was cold.

Mr and Mrs Wilkie were taking a walk round the deck. They paused for a moment.

‘Singularly distasteful trip, this, I always think, don’t you?’ Mr Wilkie remarked with that roll in his voice that I associated with Mr Micawber.

I looked at the black shapes of the Port Hills, the pinpoint lights of Lyttelton, the rough, cold sea and the harbour heads with Godley Lighthouse beaming across them.

‘It’s wonderful,’ I said.

‘You don’t mean to say this is your first trip?’

‘Yes. I can hardly believe it’s true.’

I heard Mrs Wilkie’s warm laugh. They moved away. ‘Youth!’ the Micawber voice rolled out in a generalized comment. ‘My God! Youth!’

I went below and presently, in company with Miss Vera St John, was seasick.

We came into Wellington at seven the next morning and late the same afternoon caught the Express to Auckland where we were to open in three days’ time.

In this year the Prince of Wales visited New Zealand and our tour was arranged to follow hard in his wake before the enormous crowds had dispersed. The train journey to Auckland would take about fourteen hours and with or without a sleeper was, and still is, one of considerable discomfort and few amenities. I, however, persisted in my rapture. It was the first of many such occasions and I was to grow familiar with the look of my fellow players in transit: the ones who read, the ones who stared out of the window, the ones who slept, the cheerful, the morose and the resigned. Mr Wilkie and Pat Scully, their shoulders hunched and their heads nodding with the motion of the train, played endless games of two-handed whist. Mrs Wilkie read. Jack Castle-Morris told me stories of his experiences as an actor in Africa and as a soldier in the mud and carnage of Flanders. I had a sketchbook with me and made drawings of many of the company. The world outside darkened and night had fallen when we reached Palmerston North where the train waited for half an hour while we hurtled into an eating room and had plates of food slammed down in front of us. Dining cars had long since been abandoned by New Zealand Railways. Mr Wilkie was nowhere to be seen.

Here, at Palmerston, our child-actor, B. Briggs, having alighted to refresh himself with pork pies entered the wrong train and was borne rapidly back to Wellington. This mischance did not call up any particular consternation in the company. Mrs Wilkie murmured
that there were no doubt other infant phenomena in Auckland. Henri Doré stuck his head round the door of our compartment and shouted ‘Dunton Evening Echo’ in a falsetto voice. Addie Scully said: ‘Never stops eating: that’s the root of his trouble. He’ll turn up, don’t worry, if he has to charter a special.’ Remembering my own childish terrors I was alarmed for B. Briggs: unnecessarily as it turned out. He presented himself and his professional card at the Station Master’s Office in Wellington and was, by what precise means I have forgotten, speeded north again.

Mr Wilkie had been brought a sheaf of telegrams at Palmerston. He stood at the far end of the swaying carriage in what appeared to be a portentous discussion with Kingston Hewett. The guard came through and joined them. Everybody settled down and after a timeless interval we prepared for the night. The train had worked itself into its accustomed uproar. The guard came through again and turned down the lights to a cadaverous blue. I tipped back my seat, arranged my hired pillow and twisted myself into a series of unpromising postures. The clamour of our progress swelled and faded, became grotesque and was lost in a scurrying flight of images.

I opened my eyes. Kingston Hewett and Pat Scully were lurching down the corridor. They leant over the occupants of the seats and shook them. Because one could not hear what they were saying they seemed to behave secretively. They left behind them a wave of consternation and bemused activity. As they came near I heard their message. The Company would leave the train at Frankton Junction. A general strike was coming into force on New Zealand Railways and the Auckland season would be delayed. We had
The Luck
scenery on board and would fill in by playing at Hamilton and Cambridge.

I had only just crammed my oddments into a suitcase and scrambled into my overcoat when we drew into Frankton Junction. It was now, I think, about two o’clock in the morning.

When the train had gone and we were left in a huddle on the silent and deserted station, it seemed to me that now we were displayed, for nobody to see, in our irreducible element. Our rugs and suitcases might have been bundles of swords, goblets, tinselled doublets and a tarnished crown or two. Nothing of moment had altered since the days of the strolling players: we were on the road.
I remember that this notion seemed to be confirmed by Henri Doré who croaked sardonically:

‘For us and for our traged-eye.’

The porter lit a fire in the waiting room and we sat round it on hard benches. Somebody – could our touring manager have met us there? – said that before morning a vehicle of sorts would pick us up and take us into Hamilton. It was only about three miles away. One or two of the men, I think Mr Wilkie was among them, decided to walk. We heard them tramp off down the frosty road. I slid to the floor and leant my head against the bench.

Time passed in a blur of half-sleep, aching bones and a feeling of immense satisfaction. At dawn a motor-lorry came. The cocks were crowing when I stumbled into a bedroom in a sleeping hotel.

My first two nights on tour had not been without incident.

All through that winter we moved up and down New Zealand with our four plays. The places changed, the routine was constant. One arrived and, in the jargon of actors, ‘found a home’. One went down to the theatre, collected one’s mail, saw the familiar set mounted on a new stage and attended the run-through for words. Somewhere or another I have a sketch in oils that I made one morning from the stalls. In the foreground, looming over the footlights, is the rearward aspect of the actor-manager. His overcoat makes a dark rectangle, his hands are in his pockets and a trace of cigarette smoke rises above his bullet-shaped head. He watches rehearsal, picks up any bits that have lost tone and will move into the action when his cue comes. Pat Scully sits at his table on the prompt side. The actors are dabbed in with broad touches. The play is
A Temporary Gentleman.

More evocative than this sketch was the tune broadcast the other day, and heard after a forty years’ interval, of a raucous song the men used to bawl offstage during the second act.

Après la guerre fin-ee

Soldats anglais par-tee

Maddymazelle, O what will she say

When she finds all ‘er best customers gawn away?

What ‘ave they left be’ind?

Souvenir for Yvonne.

They spent all their pay and they alleyed away

Beaucoup zig-zag très bong.

Yes, I feel sure
A Temporary Gentleman
would revive, given the right treatment: say, by Miss Joan Littlewood.

In the afternoons I sometimes went for a walk with Mrs Wilkie who was indefatigable in such exercise. How very unlike she was to the actress gay of popular imagination! Both she and her husband loathed parties from the bottom of their souls, dressed quietly, read widely and were happiest in each other’s company and that of a few close friends. If every human being has an affinitive creature, Mrs Wilkie’s was the gazelle. She was delicately in accord with Viola and Rosalind and alighted on their comedy lines with a warmth and sureness of touch that surprised and delighted by its freshness. As Ophelia she solved, without excess, the problem of reconciling ‘distraction’ with lyricism. When she first studied this part she used to visit a mental hospital where the resident psychiatrist was a personal friend of the Wilkies. He told her that from a professional point of view the characteristics were most accurately observed by Shakespeare and he arranged that she should meet parallel cases: adolescent girls whose behaviour, she said, was uncannily evocative of the part. She discovered their colour preferences: magenta and a morbid dull blue and these she wore in the mad scene. When they played
Hamlet
in Christchurch, my mother used to make Ophelia’s crazy bouquets, going to infinite pains over them. Mrs Wilkie said they were the most demented flowers she ever had and they delighted her.