A Postillion Struck by Lightning (23 page)

Mother was asked to go to California to join the Lasky Players. Seeing herself thrusting Theda Bara from the confines of the screen, she packed a bag and signed the contract. In that order. My astonished, but cool, father said that it was either Lasky or himself; she could not have both. After days of tearful pleading, sulking, and despair, she stayed, and never ever got further West in her life than New York when she was well over fifty. She never forgot, however, and she never, totally, was able to forgive. But she was a good, properly brought up young woman, and honour
was honour and the pact she made with my father lasted happily all their lives together. But the dull pain, and the vague feeling of disappointment, even un-achievement, was to remain buried away inside all her life. And all of ours.

I was born the following March. She was delighted, if vague, about it all. She has always said that I was conceived in Paris, which I do not doubt, for they travelled extensively to France in that first year of marriage, and that she was determined I should be born there. However, she muffed that too through no fault of her own, and though it was touch and go that I should be born in a taxi, they made the nursing home and I arrived at eight-thirty in the morning of March 28th, 1921. From that moment on, loving my father as much as she clearly did, she knew that she was trapped. No longer could Hollywood beckon. Well, it could; but she was never to be able to heed its call. Not that it ever did call again; but she never completely gave up hope.

My mother's background was a large Victorian Ayrshire family. Eleven children in all. She was last but three in the line. My grandfather, once a man of substance, was elegant, handsome, a gifted painter and an indifferent Actor. He was Cartoonist for a Glasgow paper, and was adored by all who met him. He wore cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, and loved my mother most of all his children for she was the “one most like me”. Eventually, unable to bear the tremendous constrictions of a tight family life he left home and went out into the world with The Actors, joining the Neilson Terrys, the Forbes Robertsons and the Cyril Maudes and finally, kidnapping my mother from the home, she was ten, pressed her into service as his servant and companion. Together for a number of years, they toured the Provinces, coming, happily, to rest under the elegant portals of the Haymarket Theatre in “Bunty Pulls The Strings”.

He had realised, as have done others before him, and since, that though he had a tremendous physical presence and a beautiful voice, he had not got the spark for greatness. He had started in the theatre too late in life and could not adjust, totally, to this glittering world which he so adored but felt a little lost within.

Not so his daughter Margaret. The moment she hit the Stage, at eleven or abouts, she was On. And at the Haymarket, while Grandfather played a tiny part as an old shepherd, his daughter bounced over a canvas wall as the Ingenue. Both their fates were, to some extent, sealed. After “Bunty” closed he went sadly back to Scotland and left his daughter hooked for life. Back to the big family house in Langside, back to his resentful and by now deserted wife, who was rightfully resentful, back to his family of ten who hardly knew him and were so deeply cloaked in their own respectability that they no longer wished to.

Mother was the Lost Sheep. And although they all tried to settle her back among them, she refused to remove her lipstick, and yearned to go back to the South. Which she did pretty quickly, using the Wounded Soldiers, and her charming talent, as an excuse. Her high spirits, her jollity, her very unusual beauty and above all the great warmth of her heart and her adoration for the world at large saw to it that she never failed.

Until the night of the Chelsea Arts Ball in 1920 … and that can hardly be called a failure. A change of direction certainly; and I never cease to thank God that she took it.

I have said that we, as children, hardly ever made friends. This is not strictly true in the case of about four people, three of whom were at school with me, the other, a girl, who was Italian and lived in a large tumbling Roman family not very far from us. Her name was Giovanna and she was my sister's Best Friend and they went to school together at a large convent, pleasantly set in walled gardens. The other three were, strictly speaking, my Best Friends, although they might not have considered me as such. For they were seldom invited into the walls of my Centre and our friendship existed for most of the time during school.

My nearly closest friend was Jones G. C. He was called Minor to distinguish him from another Jones who was Major and who bullied me without pause, “bumping” me on the Playing Fields, shoving powdered glass down my neck during Physics, and generally behaving in a thoroughly disagreeable way. But Jones G. C. was very quiet, a studious boy who lived in a big house in Finchley Road and kept toads and birds and wore thick hornrimmed glasses. He was as hopeless at Games as I, and was a willing participant in my Plays because he could just read his books until he had to say his lines and no one bothered him. Not even Jones Major.

Foot was very fat. As fat as any boy I ever knew. It was rumoured all over the school that the reason for his weight was not so much that he ate prodigiously, which he did, but that his testicles had failed to drop. This made him rather interesting and a great deal of time was spent at the Showers and in the Changing Rooms to verify this anatomical disaster. No one, it seems, was convinced. And no one ever actually got the chance to clearly find out, for he was as delicate in his undressing and showering as a nun. And even Jones Major didn't do very much about him. Foot ate and read a great deal. He wore thick pebble glasses, and dribbled. He also hated Games, with a dull passion, played all the fat boy parts in my plays and bored a hole with a hat-pin through his mother's bathroom door so that we could all peer at her, with one blurred eye, having her bath. I found this a rather dismal thing to do; she was as fat as he was and just as unattractive.

Trevor Roper was the third and last of my Friends. A tall vibrant boy, who more or less Designed the plays. While I did the writing and directing and casting, and all the acting if I could, he arranged the sets, the seats, the curtains, and lights when needed. He was alive, vivid and busy. Once, as a visitor to our house on a reconnaissance trip to find a suitable stage in which to perform a new play we had written in tandem, he discovered, to his delight, the big bay window in our hall, and with a flourish, which startled my mother, made swift plans to rig curtains, fix lights and turn the place into Drury Lane with a few nails and ten yards of velvet. I pointed out that there was no exiting space left and right of his Proscenium Arch. Merely wall. He airily decided that we should remove all the windows and make our exits and entrances into the garden. It seemed a logical idea to everyone but my mother.

The play was abandoned for the time being.

We made a solid group of four wandering about the grounds of the school in an inseparable block. Discussing plays and stories and who to cast as what. Until my brother was born.

Two days into shock I returned to my friends and told them of the news. They were all suitably amazed. Foot, whom we called Elephant because of his name and not because of his size strangely enough, was horrified. “Your mother's so terribly old. I think it is disgusting. Fancy having a baby as old as that. It might have killed her!” She was, of course, very old. Exactly thirty-three. Trevor Roper found it all unpleasant and decided
not to comment beyond saying that it was “jolly hard luck” on me. And Jones G. C. looked very vague and wondered, aloud, how it could have happened.

“I know,” said Foot. “It is all too simple, and that's why people should be more careful about where they pee.”

We all looked a little surprised; even Trevor Roper was intrigued. Foot explained that all you had to do to have a baby was for the father and mother to pee together into the same chamber pot, and the baby came out of the mixture as a sort of amoeba. It didn't at all convince Jones G. C. who was very good at Botany. And although I knew, because I had been given a small book by my father and looked at the pen and ink drawings, I was not about to tell them. The book was impossible for me to understand from the written point of view, but the diagrams were simple and easy to follow and although it all rather put me off and made my sister scream when I told her up under the lilac one day, I went along with it and obliterated what I could not understand. Or chose not to understand.

I tolerated Giovanna Govoni because she was very, very nice and nearly like a boy. And although she was strictly speaking my sister's Best Friend, she was often at the house and kept out of my way so I was not disturbed. On the other hand she seemed to be interested in snails and frogs and stick-insects, and kept goldfish. Which brought her nearer to me than the fact that she spent hours with my sister looking at this absurd baby which had crashed into our midst.

There was another reason for my liking, even accepting, Giovanna as a friend. And that was her mother's cooking. When you went to their house, not unlike our own but a bit bigger with an old chestnut tree in the garden, it was not at all like going to anyone else's house I knew. Although the walls, and rooms, and even the furniture, conformed to the English Style in every conceivable way, the atmosphere within those walls was more Roman than it was London. There was always a most delicious smell of cooking. Of basil, of garlic, of rice and of olive oil. The family, Uncle Gianni and Aunt Isali plus their twin sons, Italo and Mario who were very much younger than we were, filled the house with music, laughter, screaming, and violent
conversation which I found both stimulating and exciting. Coupled with the cooking smells, a great bowl of goldfish on the sitting-room mantelpiece, there was also the constant and delightful presence of Madame Chiesi; she was Giovanna's grandmother on her mother's side, a tall elegant woman from the Swiss border, who spoke no English and spent most of her time sitting in a high-backed chair, dressed in black with little white frills, sewing, knitting or making something fragile in threads and silks. I adored her, even though we never spoke a common language. She soothed frayed tempers, found the sweets when needed, scolded and laughed and spread love about her like a bounty.

Giovanna's mother, Isali, was a little younger than our mother, fair and blue-eyed, very strict and correct but always bright and busy in her kitchen making great bowls of pasta and soups filled with as many delights as a Christmas stocking. She very soon took my mother, and her kitchen, in hand and for a long time to come our house was filled with the most delicious aromas, and great cotton sacks of rice and pasta which came from as far away as Milan and Verona. Lally mournfully observed that we all ate more rice than the entire Chinese Nation, and that rice, correctly cooked and prepared, should be served with a bay leaf, honey, and a crisp golden apron. She glumly forked her way through endless Risotto alia Milanese, Risi e Bisi and Risotto Rusticos with a face like thunder and a growing weight problem.

Apart from all the laughing, quarrelling, Italians in the house with the chestnut tree, there was also Bertha.

She was German, blonde, strong, very jolly and came from Hamburg. She spoke dreadful English which delighted us all, for the Govonis spoke fluently, and smelled appallingly. However, she was kind, loved children, especially the twins, Italo and Mario, and never found anything too much for her to do. Every afternoon, wet or fine, she would stand on a rug in the middle of the garden, dressed only in an ugly black and white swimming suit, with a big tin alarm clock ticking away beside her, and do her “Physical Exercises” much to our delight and, at first, astonishment. When the alarm went off she stopped, took three or four deep breaths, picked up the rug and the clock and marched back into the house to start the tea. It was her Strength Through Joy, she said.

We merely thought she was a bit touched in the head, and let it pass. No one else we knew put on a bathing suit and did
gymnastics in the back garden with an alarm clock, and no one else we knew went on holiday with a rucksack and a collapsible kayak to canoe round the West Coast of England for their summer holidays. We were aware that she was not joking, or bragging, because she was also an ardent photographer, and one of the special joys of having Bertha home again was to go up to her very smelly little bedroom and sit on the bed amidst the debris of the rucksack and the bits of collapsible kayak, and look through all her “snaps”. Views of Swanage, of Bournemouth Pier and Portsmouth, of cheerful groups of brown, sweaty people, waving and laughing at the camera on miles of beaches from Penzance to the Tilly Whimm Caves. She never seemed to miss a trick, and most of them delighted us. Presumably we were not the only ones meant to be delighted.