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In those days Stratford didn’t provide much in the way of eating-places. There were one or two hotels, where the meals were quite
out of my reach, and one teashop,
where very small but delicious doughnuts cost four pence each – a ruinous sum. I couldn’t buy food in shops, as Dot had my ration book. I subsisted on cups of tea and Player’s
Weights, the cheapest cigarettes available.

The first Friday night that I returned to my digs I was met at the door by Dot’s father, brawling drunk. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he said, and when I said I
lived there, he yelled, ‘Damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon,’ and slammed the door in my face. It was a fine but chilly night. I wandered the streets disconsolately; the theatre
would be closed, and I’d nowhere else to go. I was also rather frightened: Stratford was full of lonely Czech soldiers who were reputed to collect women in pairs and rape them.

Eventually, in sheer desperation, I returned to Mansell Street, hoping that Dot’s father would have retired for the night. He had. Dot met me apologetically. ‘It’s only on
Fridays,’ she said. ‘Just be quiet on the stairs.’ Thereafter, on Fridays, I waited outside until Dot gave me the signal. On rehearsal days I used to spend the evening sitting in
bed, wrapped in the slippery eiderdown, writing another play, and letters to Pete.

Margaretta, or Peggy, Scott was astonishingly kind to me. She invited me to her dressing room, and when I told her I was writing a play asked to see it. I said I’d have to read it to her,
since my writing wasn’t legible enough for other people. She was a good listener, and made helpful comments. Sadly, she left when
The Doctor’s Dilemma
finished, and I missed her
very much.

Pete came to see me – suddenly. He took me to dinner in a hotel, and asked if he could come back to my digs for the night. He was very upset about something, but he said he didn’t
want to talk about it at dinner. By the time we got back to Mansell Street the house was dark, and as it wasn’t a Friday, it seemed worth the risk. I thought, though, that I’d better
ask Dot and she was very nice about it. ‘After all, there is a war on,’ was all she said.

In bed, in the dark, Pete, after some persuasion, told me what
was the matter. Someone he’d loved for a long time, he said, had decided to get married, and although
he’d no right to, he felt utterly bereft. ‘I simply had to tell you,’ he said. I remembered the beautiful girl with whom he’d had an affair but didn’t marry. Once when
I was at Fritton, a very lovely girl had come to lunch, and she and Pete had gone for a long walk together; when she returned I thought she’d been crying. ‘Poor little girl,’ K
had said to me, ‘another broken heart.’ I hadn’t liked the way she said it – more like a triumph for Peter than misery for the girl. It must be the same one. Wasn’t it
rather a good thing that she’d found someone else so she could stop being unhappy about Peter?

It wasn’t a girl, it was a man, he told me. He had loved him more, probably, than anyone else in his life, and now it was at an end. He talked and talked about it – poured out all
his misery and conflict. He could see that this was the best thing for
him
in every way; it was just that he couldn’t bear to think about the loss. He couldn’t help feeling angry
as well as miserable about it; he had to tell someone, and he felt I’d understand. ‘And you do understand, don’t you? You’re so wise, so grown up for your age.’

I said I did: and in one sense this was true. I could understand what loving someone and being rejected for another might be like. I’d never seen Pete so unhappy – or unhappy at all,
for that matter – and all I wanted to do was try to comfort him. He wept. He made love to me and said afterwards how glad he was that he’d told me and he’d known I’d
understand. We got up very early in the morning and I walked to the station with him. ‘Darling little Jenny,’ he said, as he kissed me from the train window, ‘I do love you, you
know.’ I walked back to my digs, light-headed from lack of sleep. I didn’t feel little at all. I felt older and
needed
.

The next play was a truly frightful piece called
His Excellency the Governor
. I was to play the
ingénue
with whom the much older Governor falls in love. All I remember of it
is freezing in my backless chiffon evening dress, being steadily upstaged by cunning, more experienced actors, and being described by Balliol as ‘thin as
a toast
rack’. We were performing it because it had been one of
his
youthful successes; the actress who subsequently became his wife had played my part.

The only nice thing that happened was that Wayland turned up unexpectedly to pay me a visit. I was terribly pleased to see him. He arrived during a matinée, and could only stay a few
hours. I put him in the dressing room I shared. It was pointed out to me at once that we weren’t allowed men in our dressing rooms during performances. He was only there for a couple of
hours, I explained, and there was nowhere else for him to go. I could only talk to him when I was off-stage and during the interval. It was lovely to see him and I felt very sad when he went.

Some of the older actors often offered to take me home after evening performances but, after being groped by two of them, I gave this up for the alternative hazard of the Czech officers who sat
outside the stage door. After Peggy left I’d no friends in the company. I was feeling less and less sure of my ability to act, and the lack of food and the cold induced a kind of chronic
fatigue. I got sore throats and felt generally rotten.

Shortly after Peter had stayed, Dot told me I’d have to leave. She didn’t give any reason, but I suspected that her father had found out that he had stayed the night. When I told the
tall blonde, Sheila, who shared a dressing room with me, she told me she’d found digs with a twin-bedded room, which was too expensive for her alone. I went to the tall Georgian house and was
interviewed by a forbidding woman who turned out to be Lesley Waring’s father’s housekeeper. The rent was three pounds a week for the room and breakfast only, and I didn’t see how
I could afford it, but it seemed the only place to go.

The third play was by Maria Marten,
The Murder in the Red Barn
, and I was cast in a tiny part. Sheila was playing the lead. I’d hardly been in the new digs a week before I fell ill
– a fever and another sore throat. I went to the local panel doctor who, without looking at me, reached for a bottle of brown liquid that he gave me
to take. It did no
good. I was too ill to go to rehearsals. Sheila was full of her part, and took very little notice of me. I think I should have starved had not kind Dot, who’d discovered where I’d gone,
turned up with a covered plate of good old sheep’s heart and cabbage. As soon as I could stand, I staggered into the theatre, to be told I was fired for not turning up for rehearsals. I
didn’t much care. I’d made no friends, hadn’t had a decent part and had certainly not done much with those I’d been given. I was eighteen and a half and didn’t seem to
have achieved anything. All I had was a new idea for a play, the construction of which was defeating me. All I could do was go back to Sussex.

I can’t remember how I met Ronnie Jeans, probably through his son Michael, who’d been at Instow. But I met him with his secretary, Ray Gregerson. Ronnie had been a
famous revue writer, for Charles Cochran, and André Charlot. He also wrote plays, and somebody suggested I should send him one of mine. I sent him
Outrageous Fortune
. He asked me to
go and see him. He must then have been in his fifties, but he seemed very old to me. He had a quiet voice, a humorous face and he seemed kind and interested. I found myself telling him about the
new idea I had, which was that different actors should play the different aspects of the major character. The idea fascinated him, and when I said I found it difficult to know how to treat it, he
suggested that we collaborate.

I instantly agreed; there was a great deal of mutual enthusiasm. I asked him what he thought of the play I’d sent. He said it was good in parts, but the construction was fatally flawed,
one couldn’t go back on one’s tracks in the second and third acts, as I’d done. This was a dreadful disappointment, and I didn’t feel he was right. It crossed my mind that
he might be dismissing the play because he wanted me to concentrate on the new idea. Anyway, that was what we did – for weeks and months. Ronnie had a flat in Hallam Street where I worked
with him. Then we’d part, and write the scenes we had allotted to each other. He also had a house at Walberswick in Suffolk, where his wife Marjorie, who wrote novels and was
‘into’ Ouspensky, spent some of her time. However, the Craxtons found me a room in a block of flats near them – Acomb Lodge had been
bombed and they’d
been forced to move. I lived with a sad Jewish spinster, who loved music and what she called ‘the little daintinesses of life’.

The play, called
Triple Harness
, was written and rewritten, but never seemed right. Ronnie took me to lunches in posh restaurants where I met theatre luminaries. I particularly remember a
lunch with J. B. Priestley when Ronnie, enthusing about our play, told him the entire plot. About two years later Priestley wrote a play that contained my idea.

That winter I got a small part in a radio play and I remember John Laurie saying, ‘This is such a bloody awful play I am going to play it without my teeth,’ whereupon he removed them
and they sat glaring at us on his reading desk. The rest of the cast smiled kindly, but I felt too new to dare to join them.

A great many new things had happened to me, but I felt it important never to look or sound surprised and thereby avoid people remarking on my youth. I was hell bent on
maturity, and the appearance of it seemed the first step. Ronnie – I called him Jay – was extremely kind to me; treated me absolutely as an equal, seemed interested in my opinions and
constantly told me how good I was at playwriting. I remember telling him that I’d not put Esquire on envelopes in my letters to him, as I thought it was silly; that men should be allowed to
have long hair, and wear gold earrings – like Shakespeare. I always sat on the floor during our work sessions, and my clothes, such as they were, were awful. I had very few, in any case,
since clothes coupons had come in while I was still growing. I remember a leaf-green woollen dress, bought at C&A for three pounds, which I wore to restaurants with him. Otherwise I had two
pairs of trousers, some Aertex shirts and a sleeveless pullover, knitted by my nine-year-old brother in rainbow-coloured wool that arbitrarily changed violent shades every few inches. I also had a
whitish coat, my only one. I bit my nails, and still wore the good old Tangee lipstick.

Sometimes I went back to Sussex for weekends. My mother had a studied lack of interest in the all-important play, but otherwise she didn’t obstruct me. She didn’t
like my association with Jay. I think eventually I arranged for them to meet, and his age seemed to reassure her.

I told Jay about Pete, and he simply said, ‘Well, you have all the time in the world.’ Pete had been transferred to the Coastal Forces to command a motor torpedo boat. He now got
more frequent though shorter leaves, and I joined him at Fritton several times that winter. Once I went straight from Walberswick to Fritton to find Bill alone, as K was in London and Pete had not
yet arrived. I felt rather nervous of an evening alone with Bill, but need not have worried: he was a gracious and warm man.

Shortly after that Christmas, my parents insisted I should make some attempt to join the Wrens.
Triple Harness
had failed to get a producer: at one point an impresario called George Black
had seemed interested, but then he died. It was finally clear to me that I had to join the war, so I went to a recruiting centre. Up until now nobody had ever attempted to test me or the methods by
which I’d been educated. The following interview cut new ground from under my feet.

The lady who examined me was a Wren officer who sat at a desk in Westminster while an unsteady stream of English girlhood queued to pass her fire. In a few short minutes she’d discovered I
hadn’t matriculated, or even passed my School Certificate; I’d hardly been to school, had no languages and couldn’t even type. On being asked what I
had
done, I mentioned
the theatre and play-writing. The first she regarded with suspicion, and the second she dismissed as an occupation. As there were dozens of candidates behind me all looking as though they’d
passed School Certificate, she announced that the only vacancies in the service were for cooks and stewards and that she didn’t think I’d be suitable. I opened my mouth to say I could
cook, but her watertight attention was thankfully on the next girl. My terror of community life boiled
in my throat and I left. It seemed too much for the Wrens to accept me at
such great mutual sacrifice.

I went back to the country and told my family that the Wrens didn’t want me, and it was decided that I should be of no use for anything until I’d learned to type. It seemed
extraordinary and sad that, after years of education, I couldn’t do the only thing I was any good at, and that to do anything else required further training.

The next morning I went to get some shoes repaired. The cobbler worked at the end of the village in a little hut. He was a kindly, tragic-looking man and very good at his job. He was deaf and
dumb, but could read and write, and he had a slate on which one wrote one’s requirements. He would then examine the shoes and give a written estimate of time and cost. Our smiles that morning
were stretched to embrace the whole greeting, and I wrote my needs – new soles and heels – on his slate.

He turned my shoes absently in his hands – he wasn’t really looking at them – seized the slate suddenly, wrote furiously upon it, and pushed it into my hands. It read
‘You lovely girl like princess me like marry you.’ Then there was a pause and ‘?’. I looked up, his face was lit with intention. He pushed the pencil into my hand and rubbed
the slate clean carefully for my reply. I wrote, ‘You very kind. Can’t marry anybody must learn typing for war.’ He read it, and his face changed slowly like the sun going in. He
shrugged his shoulders very gently, and wrote, ‘Tuesday. 12/6 don’t get bombed.’