Black Beech and Honeydew (18 page)

One of my clearest remembrances of her is on the nights when she played the errant mill-girl in
Hindle Wakes.
When she was made-up, she liked to murmur through her lines in the first scene, a demanding one, and asked me to go to her dressing-room and feed her the cues while she held her hands, which were delicate, in a basin of almost scalding water. It was better, she said, than making them up. She used to keep them there until she was called: they emerged scarlet and swollen. She was very good indeed in this part, the only one of any real significance that she played during that tour.

I am not a great hoarder. The fragment of a scarlet and white stick-on-label still clings to the lid of an old suitcase in my cellar but if it was opened I doubt if I should find any forgotten programmes or press notices or photographs of the Wilkie Company on Tour and I don’t know where the sketchbook can be in which I made drawings of the actors. But on my bookshelves there is a copy of Maeterlinck’s
Monna Vanna
with an inscription in Mrs Wilkie’s hand on the flyleaf.

‘I had an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner: – Let him on a certain day read a certain page full of poetry or distilled prose, and let him wander with it and muse upon it and reflect from it and dream upon it…Any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all “the two-and-thirty Palaces". How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious, diligent indolence!’

The quotation is from Keats.

In her continuous travels through the Far East, North America and Australasia, Mrs Wilkie could not be said to have a golden opportunity for the enjoyment of this delicious indolence but in general terms the excerpt does express something of her temperament.

But how strange that forty years ago an intelligent, highly civilized and deeply read woman could have thought so well of
Monna Vanna
and that I could have so eagerly concurred in her opinion. Literary criticism of the time supported this view: Maeterlinck was a seriously regarded dramatist and
Monna Vanna
not the least respected of his works. It is true that the central act (the ‘great love scene’ it was inevitably called) was held to be superior to the others and I can see that even now its lily-fingered swoonery might be rewarding material in the hands of two romantic players. Did Garbo ever play Vanna?

But what fustian, after all, it is and how wonderfully funny the opening of the play with three quattrocentist Pisans in a kind of bastard chorus getting great chunks of undigested plot-material off their chests. Played as it stands, with these gentlemen exchanging items of information that all of them knew beforehand, it could set a contemporary audience rolling in the aisles. How, with Shakespeare’s offhand, careless mastery before us, could we imagine that such stuff would serve? I see, by my English papers, that there is a revival in
Art Nouveau.
I trust it will languish before it includes this particular
form of romanticism: from here, it is but a short step to Wilde’s
Salome
which, by the way, the Wilkie Company played with great success in India. As an unrepentant Shakespearean I sometimes wonder if, with one or two exceptions there are no lasting criteria in dramatic writing but only fashions. Already in the anger of the young men we begin to hear whining overtones. M. Genet’s black plays may soon look merely grey. He may even achieve, before he is forgotten, his full intention: he may end by disgusting us.

In the days I am writing about, the Angries, the Dirties, the Blacks, the Existentialists, the Symbolists and the Frankly Dotties were not yet in action. The talk was of Miss Horniman’s authors, of Granville-Barker, Schiller, Ibsen, Shaw, Galsworthy, Masefield, Bjørnson, Strindberg (abhorred by Mr Wilkie) and interminably, of course, Shakespeare. It is diverting to speculate on what our reaction would have been if the far-out plays of today had, by some Einsteinian sleight-of-time suddenly flooded our stages: diverting but idle, since there was no element in us to call them up, and plays, like players, are indeed the abstracts and brief chronicles of their times. We were still on the sunny side of chaos in those days. The excruciating need for screams of protest was yet to come.

That was a winter of halcyon days for me. Nothing was lacking: not even the addition of a blameless romance which for some reason woke a massive playfulness in Mr Wilkie.

‘Has he popped the question?’ he would hiss as I waited offstage to make an entrance. Or: ‘It’s only a matter of persistence: you’ll take him in the end.’ And once in a sort of schoolboy ecstasy: ‘I’ve had seven marriages in my company. All disastrous.’

I managed to draw and paint, lugging my heavy gear about the country, and, without knowing it, I laid down a little cellar of experiences which would one day be served up as the table wines of detective cookery.

I went on learning about the techniques of theatre: of the differences between one performance and another, of the astonishing effects that may result from an infinitesimal change in timing, of how, in comedy, audiences are played like fish by the resourceful actor. I grew to recognize the personality of audiences: how no two are alike and how they never behave as a collection of individuals but always as a conglomerate.

‘What are they like, dear?’ the waiting actress asks as someone comes off.

‘Slow.’ Or ‘Eating it.’ Or ‘Bone, dear, from the eyes up.’ Or, with upcast eyes: ‘Frightening, darling, but just frightening.’

Mr Wilkie used to say he knew what they would be like as he walked in at the Stage Door. There is no other sound in the actor’s world like the sound on the far side of the curtain. If it swells and fills the auditorium with its multiple voice so that the theatre is alive with it, then his heart takes a leap and his diaphragm contracts. If it is quiet, he is apprehensive. If it is small he tries to think it is appreciative and warm. If it is big he rejoices and hopes to contain it.

I dressed with our elderly ‘character’ actress who was a dragon for superstitions. One must not whistle in the dressing-room, look through the curtain on an opening night, speak the tag at rehearsals or quote from
Macbeth.
Mrs Wilkie paid no attention to any of these shibboleths but I must confess that even now, if I catch one of my student-players whistling in the dressing-rooms, I send him out and make him knock to come in. This is a reflex action from the rockets I received forty-odd years ago.

At last, in the spring, the notices for the end of the tour went up. The present company would be disbanded and a new Shakespearean one formed in Australia. Some of my fellow players would rejoin but I would not be among them. I really could not pretend even to myself that there was a place for me in those plays.

On a wet night in Wellington I said goodbye and returned alone in the ferry to Christchurch. One of the first things I did was to wrap up Gramp’s book and send it to Mr Wilkie. In return I received a ring of which, he wrote (and I could hear the Micawberish roll): ‘It is a trifle of some reputed antiquity.’ It was and is an enchanting ring.

There were to be other tours with other companies and many solitary train journeys in many parts of the world. In all of them, whenever I have found myself in a half-empty Pullman carriage, I have re-peopled it with those long-remembered companions. There is the flighty hat of Miss St John, and there, the toque of the character lady. A Pre-Raphaelite head is bent over a book, and beside it, a bullet poll with an impressive (if vaguely Humpty-Dumptyish) face. All the other hats and pates, bobbing in a constant rhythm with the motion of the train: The Allan Wilkie Company on tour in the year 1920.

It wasn’t easy to settle down again: to return to a pattern, that, however freely designed, turned about a small house, one’s parents and a circle of quiet friends.

A new and lasting tie was formed in the person of an English cousin who, following the family tradition, had come out to seek his fortune in the colonies. He had gone straight from his Public School into the Great War, endured the shambles of the trenches and emerged, as I daresay some authorities would not scruple to put it, unscathed. He stayed with us for some time and from then until today has been ‘a son of the house’ whenever he enters it. His name is Hal. Later on his father and mother, who was my father’s eldest sister, and their daughters and youngest son, Richard, settled in the North Island. They are still my closest family tie and the relationship, in many ways, is more like that of brothers and sisters than of cousins.

After my return to Christchurch I joined a group of fellow painters and worked away with only occasional, tantalizing meetings between intention and achievement. I went on writing and here I felt there was some kind of improvement. There came an offer from an English Comedy Company and I went off again for a three months’ tour, this time with little encouragement from my mother.

‘It will lead to nothing,’ she said. ‘Why do you want to do it? It’s not the right kind of thing for you. I
know.’

‘I want to go.’

‘You’re making a mistake.’

I said I would find that out for myself and she withdrew from the argument.

Once more I was confronted by her attitude to the theatre. She knew about acting, she enjoyed meeting actors, she was ironically diverted by their shop-talk: she did not wish her daughter to adopt any part of their life or their behaviour. I believe her deep attachment to the Wilkies was first engendered by their avoidance of theatrical catchphrases or easy emotionalism.

The company I now joined was formed by Miss Rosemary Rees, a New Zealand actress who had spent her professional life in the English theatre. She is the author of a number of romances and had written a light comedy which we were to play throughout the ‘smalls’ in the North Island. Here was one of the earliest attempts to found a permanent theatre in this country.

We travelled in buses, trains and small coastal steamers and our audiences, never very big, were composed for the most part of provincial people, both Maori and Pakeha (European). It was a happy company: in it I made lasting friendships and learned a great deal about the tougher aspects of theatrical endeavour.

I began by playing a brazen adventuress of uncertain years and made, if possible, rather less of a success of it than of my somewhat similar part in
The Rotters.
Not, however, for long.

We had scarcely embarked upon our tour when the young actor who played the lively juvenile went down with scarlet fever and disaster stared us in the face. He had no understudy. For one hectic Saturday night our business manager was pressed into the service and the middle-aged character man grotesquely essayed the skittish boy. At the end of this extraordinary performance I heard Miss Rees lamenting that if only it had been one of the female roles, she could have engaged an English actress who happened to be at large in Wellington. I heard myself saying that I thought I could play the boy, ‘Jimmy’. She leapt at it. All that night and all Sunday I memorized the lines. The newcomer arrived on Sunday afternoon and took over my old role. In the evening we rehearsed. The real Jimmy’s suits were fumigated and found to fit.

Miss Rees suggested that I have my hair cut off but, willing though I was, I blenched at the thought of my mother’s reaction. A wig was obtained from I don’t know where.

On Monday we rehearsed all day and in the evening our character woman, a magnificent and much-loved old-timer called Katie Towers, screwed my abundant hair into a system of tightly strained worms and skewered them to my scalp. The wig was then adjusted over this hellish arrangement. I dressed and was called. I think I may say that I succeeded. The audience laughed, the company nobly backed me up and at the final curtain I was kissed by Miss Rees and the leading man.

Flushed with my unlikely triumph I wrote excitedly to my mother and received a snorter by return of post. I confided this reaction to Miss Rees who wrote, as she thought, tactfully and enthusiastically to my mother. With exquisite misjudgement, she held up as an exemplar, the late Miss Vesta Tilley whom she was careful to call by her title, ‘Lady de Freece’.

I did not see the reply but to me my mother wrote that she was unable to discover why it should be imagined the antics of a musichall soubrette could reconcile her to the thought of her daughter masquerading in male attire in a third-rate company. It was clear that she was miserable about the whole thing but I think the repressed but very real professionalism that lay at the back of her feeling for theatre, prevented her from precisely ordering me home. She realized that I had, however regrettably, staved off disaster. The show had gone on.

In the matter of short hair, although it was already fashionable, she was adamant.

I continued as Jimmy but I still suffered the agony of the wig.

I was also Assistant Stage Manager and since the Stage Manager was inclined to drink, the responsibility of ‘packing in and packing out’ on one-night stands was generally mine.

We played a remote town called Wairoa. After the show and with the help of the mechanist, I saw the set struck, packed on a lorry with wardrobe and props and taken down to the wharf. It was a warm, overcast night. My personal friend, the other girl in the company, was called Kiore (Tor) King and had been at RADA. With her I boarded a little coastal steamer at two o’clock in the morning. A single light showed the legend: ‘Ladies’ Cabin’. We groped our way into it, found empty bunks and crept into bed in the dark, thinking we were the only passengers.

I was just dropping off when a rich voice close beside me said profoundly:
‘Wahine pakeha.’
(White women.)

A number of other voices answered. We had stumbled upon the only two empty bunks. The others were occupied by Maori ladies on their way to Napier.

They were companionable and handed round a bottle of port which Tor and I, not to be unfriendly, made as if to share.

The ship put out and when it grew light, the seas being heavy, we were all sick.

During this adventure the new Wilkie Shakespeare Company visited Christchurch. When my mother told Mr Wilkie of my inexplicable behaviour he said, ‘I shouldn’t trouble yourself. It won’t last – I give the venture three months.’ He was right, almost to the day. The Rosemary Rees English Comedy Company, like its successors, yielded to high costs and a small population and quietly folded.

I returned home but not to settle. Tor King came to stay with us. Tor was what my mother’s generation (though not my mother, who did not relish such phrases) called ‘a thoroughly nice girl’, with beautiful manners and a ‘thoroughly nice’ background. She was also a great dear and as bright as a button. We talked endless theatre and presently I started to write sketches and we both began to think they might do and that it would be fun to try them out if we could find someone for the men’s parts. Then we thought of the real ‘Jimmy’, now recovered from his fever and marking time at home in the North Island. We wrote to him and he replied saying he thought he could fix up a contract with one of the film managements for us to take half the programme on a North Island circuit.

My mother was perfectly complacent about all this talk and, without any thought for the extra trouble it must give her, readily agreed that Jimmy should be asked to stay. I think she was pleased that I was writing, particularly when I now essayed a one-act play.

This was, to me, a serious matter. I was still at the stage bypassed, one supposes, by modern youth, when the nebulous-romantic-picturesque-Borrowesque attracted me. Pierrot was not a dirty word
and Granville-Barker’s
Prunella
had wrought its blameless spell. So much so that my one-acter was a sort of
Prunella
in reverse.

I have not kept a copy of this play but I remember it pretty well. The plot is simple and derivative. There is, as the present idiom goes, this Boy and he is a Woodman and he is Kind of Restless and feels the call of the Great Forest and the World Outside and there is this Girl he is going to marry and she is frightened of the World Outside and so when she has prepared his supper she drops off to sleep in front of the fire and her boyfriend has a soliloquy while he listens to the wind going ‘ohé’ round the hut and he gets to thinking there is Somebody Out There, abroad in the forest. So he opens the window and calls out for whoever it is to come in and so Pierrot comes in, all wet with the Rain Outside and is very fey and talks about the Stroller’s life and says it is Gay, in the original sense. Pierrette comes in and she is also very gay and fey, although damp, and speaks broken English but not the same kind as Anna the spy in
The Luck of the Navy.
And she fascinates the Boy and she and Pierrot tell him he is One of Them and she looks at the sleeping Girl and makes disparaging remarks about her. So the Boy feels the Call of the Outside which is somewhat heavily symbolized by Pierrot and Pierrette, and is tempted and works up to a climax and they forget to keep their voices down and the Girl wakes up and is frightened by their white faces. And they go silent and symbolic and stare at the Boy as they move backwards into the window and he says to the Girl not to be frightened, he will never leave her, no, no, no, staring at Pierrot and Pierrette. So they vanish through the window and the storm dies down. The Boy speaks the tag, ‘They are singing. They will soon be up the shoulder of the hill.’ Curtain. The piece was called
Little Housebound.

When Jimmy arrived we read the play and he and Tor looked at each other and with one voice ejaculated: ‘Havelock North.’

This was, and I suppose still is, a small and exclusive district in Hawkes Bay which was Tor and Jimmy’s native province. By one of those curious runnings-together of affinities, Havelock North had become a cultural centre and thought of itself as such. There was an architect whose house was constructed of axe-hewn timber with enormous axe-hewn beams supporting nothing in particular and though the floor was not actually strewn with rushes their presence
was implicit. There was a poetess in Havelock North and yoga regulated many of the families. Rudolf Steiner was a name to conjure with and handicrafts abounded. The esoteric found a fertile soil there. Eurhythmics flourished and psychic research was not ignored. In short, Havelock North would have provided the late E. F. Benson, whose ‘Lucia’ books are too little known today, with wonderful raw material.

There are girls’ boarding schools in Havelock and Tor was an old girl of perhaps the most rarefied of these establishments. She and Jimmy both agreed that
Little Housebound
was the very stuff upon which Havelock North culture blossomed. We found that with this play and the sketches and Tor’s repertoire of recitations which she performed with all the expertise of her RADA equipment, we had a full evening’s programme within our grasp. We rehearsed like mad and I blench when I ponder on the outcome. It seems to me that now, as before, my mother must have exercised superb self-control during this period but still she did not discourage us: I was writing.

At last we all went north and I stayed with Tor and her parents, who were charming. It was arranged that we should do our show in Hastings, the nearest city; at two girls’ schools and, of course, at Havelock North. I don’t remember what the financial arrangements were but Jimmy managed them and we actually made some money. He then interviewed the cinema management and we were given a tour, taking half the programme and a share of the house.

Jimmy discovered that touring companies of five or more were allowed first-class railway accommodation at second-class fares. We therefore suggested to our respective mothers that they should accompany us, which, rather to our astonishment, they agreed to do. My mother arrived looking amused and away we went. Mrs King was the daughter of a general and gifted with the psychic powers that frequently manifest themselves, I have noticed, among ladies with martial backgrounds. She passed her hands downwards on either side of my mother without touching her and my mother agreed that from one hand there was wafted a cooling draught of air and from the other a hot gust. Upon this atmospheric basis they raised a friendship and my mother confided her own extramundane experiences, which, since I can vouch for them, may now be introduced.

My mother possessed a faculty which, if she had been a Highlander, would have been called the second sight. Can it, I ask myself, have stemmed from the great-uncle with Scottish estates who so disastrously expired in his family chaise? She was not at all proud of this attribute and generally preferred to ignore it but occasionally it manifested itself with such inconsequent emphasis that we were obliged to take notice of it. I shall give three instances of her powers, if powers they were.

It may be remembered that in my earliest childhood we were visited by my father’s ‘wild’ brother, tubercular Uncle Reggie. He returned to England in due course. Some considerable time afterwards my mother, in the small hours of the night, roused up my father with the strange remark that: ‘Reggie is about and I think he wants us.’ My father assured her that she had been dreaming and himself returned to unconsciousness. My mother, however, reenacting in some measure her role as Lady Macbeth, rose from her bed, lit her candle, took a pencil, consulted her clock and tore the current leaflet from the day-to-day calendar that stood on her dressing table. Having written the exact time upon this leaflet, she folded it, tucked it behind the bulk of the calendar, returned to bed and to sleep and, in due course, forgot the incident. She remembered it some weeks later when my grandmother wrote from England that at that very hour, sitting in a garden chair in the heat of the day, Uncle Reggie had incontinently expired.