A Postillion Struck by Lightning (38 page)

“Christ Almighty!” he said. “Now I know there's a war on: they've started to ration the Talent!” And to my eager face he quietly said, “Well, don't stand there, piss off and see if the blasted things fit”, starting a deep friendship which only ended with his death more than thirty years later.

J. B. Priestley's “When We Are Married” brought me, with two thin lines, a few physical miles nearer to the West End. I don't remember very much about it except that the suit did fit and that I spent over an hour making up and sitting in a real dressing-room with real lights and real actors all about me. I also had to call the Half, the Quarter, and the Acts. I felt as tinny as the Bishopbriggs clock. Too busy to be frightened, I did what I could and was allowed to stay on till the end of the Production. Quite suddenly, and as tiresomely simple as that, I became an actor proper. Although I still had the Gents and the Club Room and the errands to run for the other actors … but as the parts got larger, for they did as time went on, I gradually had to give up
the other jobs and found that I was being paid seven and six to play quite large, for me at that time, roles. Young actors were getting hard to find easily. The war had netted quite a number already.

“There's a nice little part for you next week in ‘Saloon Bar',” said Beattie one day. “You are a bit young for it but I think you'll get away with it. Alf the Pot Boy. See what you can do.” I did. And enjoyed it thoroughly and made up my mind, halfway through the week, that I would go and ask Jack de Leon for a rise. After all, I reckoned, I was now an actor with a quite respectable line of roles behind me … a rise was not unreasonable. But on Saturday night, my pay packet had no jingly coins inside. In terror, in case it was my Notice or something, I ripped it open and a shilling fell out on to the floor. Anxiously I scrabbled in the little buff envelope. There was one green, crackly pound note. A guinea! I'd done it.

I bought Vi a gin and lime, had a giddy whisky myself and crossed the dark street to the telephone box outside the Station. My father answered as he always did, “Bogaerde here.” I told him what had happened. “And next week there's a better part in a better play and if I get it they'll double the salary to two guineas.” There was a silence on the line, I heard the pips go and my father's voice saying, “I suppose you realise that you have spent your profits. I'll tell Mother. Ring off now. Very good.” And the line went dead. But I knew that he was impressed. He was also accurate in his accounting. No more gins and whiskies, nor did I telephone them again.

The war didn't end that Christmas as so many of us had hopefully predicted, and it seemed, from where I could see, that the German tanks were hardly cardboard, and for a nation on the very brink of starvation they were doing uncomfortably well. It was an ominous, dark, waiting time. For everyone. For me it meant that Call Up loomed nearer and nearer and the chances of my making my mark in my chosen profession began to look very shaky indeed. The war, I was sure, was going to go on for ages, at least until I was over twenty-one—which was the limit I had set myself for “success”. Not stardom, never that, but calm, assured, character-lead stuff. The kind of actor who is never out
of work, always comfortably engaged, and always able to play almost any role within the wide range of Character. Never too many pressures, never too much splendour, nor too much responsibility. “Always Applauded” would suit me very well. And when Beattie gave me my first really big role, in a revival of Priestley's “Cornelius”, I knew that I had found my exact position. Lawrence, the office boy, was what I wanted always to play. No play to “carry”, a good moment in each act—the perfect role. I enjoyed it, was good in it and liked very much the compliments which started to arrive from my fellow actors. On the last night I saw Beattie in the Club Room with her book of the week's takings. “We had a good week,” she said. “Funny with a serious play. But we always do well with Priestley.” As Vi came out with us, pulling on her coat and getting her torch and gas mask ready I said to Beattie: “It was a
marvellous
week for me. I really feel now that I am a proper actor.” Beattie shot me a distant, flicker of a smile. “Do you, dear?” she said. “That's nice.”

We played one week at Q and then moved up north to the Embassy Theatre at Swiss Cottage and played a week there. They did an equal swap with us and so most plays had a good two weeks run before we had to start all over again. The Embassy was more of a theatre really than Q. It had a balcony and red plush and I had no responsibilities whatsoever back stage, so my week playing there, unless we were preparing the next production's set, was pretty quiet; I only had the Shows to worry me. And “Cornelius” was, I thought, pretty well buttoned up.

It was buttoned up. So was my acting career for the time being. Beattie informed me that there was nothing “for me” in the next three Productions but that I could carry on, if I wished, in the Gents, in the Scene Dock, and helping Vi in the Club Room. I was not over anxious. What to do? I needed advice rather quickly. Fortunately Bill Wightman had taken lodgings in a sombre yellow brick house not far away from the Embassy Theatre in Fellows Road. He was between jobs but offered me Ovaltine and chocolate digestive biscuits in his comfortable room overlooking the back gardens of Swiss Cottage. And copious advice. He agreed with me that it might be wiser to try and press ahead with the Theatre rather than go back to the Gents and boiling glue and carrying trays to more fortunate players, and suggested, very mildly, that he knew of a woman who was running a Rep Company in the country and who might be
willing to give me a job. She was, he said, finding it too much of a struggle to keep going, and that he and a friend were considering making an offer to purchase the place outright thus ensuring himself a permanent job and a permanent theatre. She had not definitely made up her mind to sell, and in the meantime she was short of a Juvenile. Perhaps I should go down and see her before I committed myself to Beattie and the Gents.

The next day, after he had telephoned and made an appointment, I took the train down to Amersham in Buckinghamshire and went to meet Sally Latimer who looked at me doubtfully and asked if I could do an American accent. I lied and said yes. She asked me what else I could do, and misunderstanding her in my anxiousness, I said that I also painted sets and worked at Q and could wait at table. For twenty-two shillings a week I got the job, and as soon as “Cornelius” closed, at the end of the week, I told Beattie and waited for the storm. There was no storm from Beattie.

“All right, dear, good luck. Remember, if you ever want to come back we'll see what we can find for you. I'm busy now dear, so let me get on with it, will you?” and she continued checking the “pull” of a poster for the next production.

It was a little over six years later that I took her up on her generous offer. On Demob leave, in my worn Service dress, a reasonable row of campaign medals on my chest, three pips on my shoulders and ten shillings in my pocket, I stood in a line of elderly women whom she was interviewing for Char Ladies. Nothing had changed, the same rubber floor, the same smell from my old Gents, the tatty silver and black paintwork, the faded stills from “Peg O' My Heart” and “Abies Irish Rose” with Beattie in a bow and gingham. Nothing seemed to have altered at all since Arromanches, Arnhem, Berlin, Bombay, Singapore and Sourabaya. As I reached her, last in the line, she looked up pleasantly from her little note book.

“Hullo dear,” she said. “Been away?”

The Amersham Rep was based in a converted grocer's shop near the station. It had no balcony, no “flight” and a very small, narrow, stage. The Green Room and the actors' dressing-rooms, one for the men and one for the women, were down in the basement
and the scene dock was a lock up garage. It was what you might call a very intimate theatre, and the atmosphere of it was more Family than Theatrical. The Front of House staff were local townspeople who worked free for the love of us, and Sally Latimer, a tough, slight, firm-jawed woman ran it with total dedication and her partner, a tall, blond-haired girl who wore flannel trousers, a blue blazer and smoked incessantly, called Caryl Jenner. We did one play a week, opening on the Monday night and starting rehearsals on the morning of the same day for the next week. It was not an unusual occurrence to find yourself rehearsing Laertes at eight-thirty a.m. and going on stage a few exhausted hours later, to open “cold” as Maxim de Winter in “Rebecca” with the Set being erected about your ears. But we never stopped, and the theatre was a success attracting at its height even the London Critics to some performances of New Plays including, and often led indeed, by the Emperor of them all, James Agate. It was clearly a place in which to learn, to work, and to love. I did all three.

I got Digs up the road in a semi-detached called “Beechcroft” behind the pub, and for five and six a week received a single bed under the roof, use of the bathroom, and a hot meal after the show which was usually scrag end of neck with barley and carrots kept hot in the oven over a low gas. I was in seventh heaven. I did my American Accent, pretty frightfully, in “Grouse in June” and started rehearsals as soon as that was over for “Call It A Day” the week that Italy declared war and the Germans invaded Belgium and Holland. It was frighteningly clear that the cardboard tanks were making shattering progress, and by the end of the week had ripped into France and were less than two hundred miles from tranquil, unsuspecting Folkestone.

We were intermittently glued to Dodie Smith and the BBC. It didn't seem as if we had very much time left. We opened to smaller houses than usual and found the laughs rather difficult to “get”. In an atmosphere charged with emotions of every kind, filling the air with the sullen zig-zags of summer lightning I, inevitably, fell deeply in love with my Leading Lady, a red-haired Scots girl a couple of years older than myself called Anne Deans. With a stunning lack of timeliness I announced our engagement to the astonished company during a coffee break in the Green Room on the very day that the shattered British Army started its desperate withdrawal to Dunkirk. I seem to remember
that Annie was about as astonished as the Company, but was carried away by my eloquence and passion and needed, as she said, cheering up.

That evening we went down to the local equivalent of the Ritz, a chintzy, warming-panned, huddle of exposed beams and gatelegged tables called The Mill Stream, and over eggs, chips and sausage and two expensive Carlsberg Lagers celebrated my somewhat emotional announcement. I apologised for not having a ring but Annie was ahead of me and produced one, from her handbag, which belonged to her mother and which she had had the foresight to acquire just before I had collected her from her digs in White Lion Road. Slipping it on to her finger she accepted me as her future husband. I reeled with pleasure and ordered another Carlsberg Lager each.

Walking home through the blackout up the steep hill to the Recreation Grounds near which she shared two rooms with her mother, we made happy, if inaccurate, plans for our future deciding, sensibly I thought, not to get married until I was really and truly Called Up. But to go on with our Careers and announce it in the newspapers as soon as possible.

After a passionate farewell under a pollarded oak outside her front gate, I walked back to the Theatre and telephoned the news of this momentous piece of trivia to my parents who were unable to hear the telephone owing to the fact that they were both far out in the garden, standing holding hands together in the still hot night, feeling the earth trembling beneath their feet, and listening to the guns rumbling in France.