My Life in Pieces (2 page)

Then things started to look up. I explained why in a Zambian expatriates’
magazine in 1998; the journal is called, oddly enough,
Spotlight.

After my parents failed to reignite their marriage, my mother decided to move from Fort Jimmy to the capital. Everyone said the same thing: jobs were more plentiful there, there were better educational opportunities, it was safer for a woman and child in the big city than alone in the middle of nowhere. She secured a rather grand government job as Secretary to the Tender Board, and I was enrolled in the Lusaka Boys’ School. Here something marvellous happened to me for the first time: acting. The
lovely Miss Isabelle, a classic 1950’s beauty, with shiny bouffant hair, lus
cious glossy lips, fine rounded figure and a bee’s waist, was in charge of theatrical performances. Despite my lack of experience I was cast in the lead in the big show. I was wearing a very swish purple robe with gold frogging run up for me by my mother. At this age, and for some years to come, all I ever wanted for Christmas was fancy dress; this costume was an early Christmas present. I was playing a king who suffered from seeing spots before his eyes. The kingdom was scoured for someone – anyone – who could cure me; those who failed were arrested or executed. At the end of the play, when every option seemed to have been exhausted, my tailor arrived, insisting on seeing me. Finally granted an audience, he said that he was worried because he’d made my collar too small. ‘What effect would that have?’ I enquired haughtily. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you could, for example, find yourself seeing spots before your eyes.’ Curtain. End of play.

During rehearsals, I suggested to the lovely Miss Isabelle that I could at this point faint. I demonstrated, keeling right over backwards. No, said Miss Isabelle briskly, with that lovely, firm smile of hers, she didn’t think it was a good idea. I saw that opposition was fruitless, and gracefully deferred to her superior wisdom. At the performance, needless to say, having practised my fall for hours in our little bungalow in the Lusaka suburbs, I keeled right over backwards, and brought the house down. Things were never the same between Miss Isabelle and me after that.

Not much later, there was a positive development (never fully explained to
me) in the family fortunes, and I was despatched to a very grand school in
South Africa, St Aidan’s Jesuit College in Grahamstown. Education sud
denly became a much more intense affair. It was all Latin and serious
praying and corporal punishment, and definitely no keeling over back
wards. I felt intense nostalgia for Northern Rhodesia, not least for Miss
Isabelle. I was sure we could have resolved our artistic differences. But
alas it was never to be.

The train ride to school was via the Victoria Falls, the Kalahari Desert, the
Boer War towns of Mafeking and Ladysmith, down the Cape coast, past
Table Mountain and on into the very English cathedral town of Graham
stown. St Aidan’s was a school of some rigour, and I was only there for
nine months, because yet again my father’s maintenance payments had 
stalled. Before I left, though, I appeared for the first time on a proper
stage. Of the play I remember nothing, but I have a Proustian memory of
the smell of the size used to stick the set together and the canvas out of
which it was constructed and the extraordinary sense of warmth and light
as I walked on stage. This was purely the effect of the lights, of course,
but it immediately struck me as a beatific state. There survives a photo
graph of me in the play. I’m impersonating a middle-aged gentleman,
perhaps of the military persuasion; the word ‘Colonel’ comes unbidden to
mind. In this scene I’m in pyjamas, a dressing gown, and a raincoat, rais
ing my fist against a hapless boy, taller than me, who is in his street
clothes. He carries a lamp; I am very, very angry. The photo is in black
and white, but you can see I’m red in the face, my fist genuinely threat
ening, my false moustache on the point of falling off under the pressure
of so much anger. My fellow player looks at me nervously, as if he were
unsure whether the anger was the character’s or the actor’s.

There is another memory: a Christmas concert in the school hall in
Lusaka. I have been designated to read the Nativity story from the Gospel
according to St Matthew. My fellow pupils have to sing songs and read
poems. I – due to the nature of my text – am top of the bill. We sit in a
row at the front of the stage. I am restless, bored, squirming on my seat,
occasionally giggling inappropriately, looking out into the audience, unim
pressed by my colleagues, aching to make my contribution. The other
readers and singers must loathe me; parents in the body of the hall are
looking daggers at me. Finally it’s my turn. I stand up and I read, and
something happens – something in the hall, but also something in me. The
story comes to life; I have a sensation of enormous power and profound
poetry; the words seem to hang in the air; it’s as if these hoary old words
were being spoken for the first time. I come to the end of the passage, but
the spell lasts for a few seconds afterwards. Somebody makes announce
ments, and expresses thanks, and I am again a squirming, restless child on
a stool. Afterwards, my mother, severely berating me for my selfishness
and my lack of discipline (a quality by which she set great store), ends
by saying, ‘But you read marvellously. It was thrilling. Everybody was
spellbound.’

Africa saw the height of my religious, or rather my ecclesiastical, aspira
tions. I was an altar server, and rose quite high in the ranks, to the extent
that I participated prominently in the ordination of a bishop in Lusaka. In
Grahamstown, I had gone so far as to found my own sodality, and even
held services, spontaneously improvising prayers. The rubric of the
Catholic Church, before the second Vatican Council, was theatrically unin
hibited: Latin, incense, processions, prostrations. We wore very colourful
vestments, there was a backstage and an onstage, and I yearned to be a
priest, leading the congregation in obscure prayers in a dead language,
moving them to tears in my sermon, distributing Christ’s body and blood
from golden chalices, communing privately in a whisper with my God. I
might have become a priest, too, until Latin was abolished overnight and
the Vulgate suddenly revealed the tawdriness of the whole thing.

We finally returned to England, my mother and I, when I was nearly
twelve. On the boat coming across, I entered a fancy dress competition as
a cancan girl; I won first prize. The best thing was being wolf-whistled
as I went up to collect it. I came back to England at the wrong time of the
academic year, and missed the 11-Plus, but by sheer persistence my
mother managed to get me into a Catholic grammar school, the London
Oratory, which – though it was in smartest Sixties Chelsea, with the ultra-
modish pop singer Georgie Fame living literally on our doorstep in
Stewart’s Grove – was a rather thuggish place. It had once been very good
and is now very good again, but then, under a repressive and unimagina
tive headmaster, it was deep in the doldrums. It had been used as a
detention camp during the war, and the bars were still up at the windows.
This seemed to us to say it all.

One of the school’s many deficiencies was an absence of drama. Instead,
we had Elocution. This poisoned chalice had been handed to an elegant
middle-aged woman by the name of Mrs Williams. In my mind’s eye, she
was always dressed in a black cocktail gown flecked with silver and blue
scintillants, her lovely grey hair gaily coiffed and full of bounce, her spec
tacles,
à la mode
, curving upwards, pink, with shiny speckles. I realise now
that this cannot have been so, but it conveys the degree to which she
seemed out of place in the rough environs of the London Oratory School.
She struggled to command attention. Challenged almost beyond endurance
by the task of trying to inculcate the virtues of open vowels and precise
plosives into her Sarf London pupils, she had a slightly deranged quality.
‘Ray of the Rainbows,’ she would chant ecstatically at us, caressing and
shaping the air with her hands and arms, as if conducting an invisible
Aeolian orchestra, extending every vowel to breaking point, seductively
rolling her r’s like a tiger purring: ‘Raaaaaaay of the Rrrrrrrrraaaaain-
boooowsss.’ Meanwhile, her charges went serenely about their usual daily
lives, stabbing each other, carving lewd messages into their desktops or
closely inspecting the contents of their nostrils. Because my vowels and
plosives were, in their native state, pretty much what she thought vowels
and plosives should be, I was smiled on by Mrs Williams. One term, with
a misplaced enthusiasm that bordered on the delusional, she attempted to
stage some scenes from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. She gave me the
part of Bottom, so – although I had no inkling of it myself – she must
have glimpsed the latent thespian in me. Or perhaps it was just the plo
sives and vowels.
 

I declaimed, as I strode up and down Room 3. Like Bottom himself, I
longed to play all the parts, and I frequently did, because people would
find any excuse not to show up for the class. I’d leap in to fill the breach,
often happily playing scenes with myself. But Mrs Williams’s purpose was
not to produce a one-man show, and in the end, she threw the towel in, a
beaten woman, and we went back to ‘Raaaaay of the Rrrrrainbooowssss.’
But it was never the same after that, and she went through the motions
increasingly mechanically, the Aeolian orchestra sadly muted.

My Shakespearean explorations were not confined to school. My family
were not great readers, but like most British people of the time, they had
a
Complete Works of Shakespeare
on the bookshelf. This particular one
belonged to my maternal grandmother, another ample-bosomed, sweet-
breathed, spirited old personage like Mrs Birch, and it was a rather
splendid affair, in three volumes –
Comedies
,
Tragedies
and
Histories
–
edited by Dr Otto Dibelius of Berlin, and illustrated with Victorian black-
and-white engravings which suggested some of what I had imagined on
the radio on Mrs Birch’s knee (though as it happens the illustrations for
Macbeth
itself disappointed me by comparison with what had filled my
listening imagination, as has every production I’ve attended ever since).

As a no doubt somewhat overwrought twelve-year-old I would stretch out
with the precious volumes on the tiger-skin rug in my grandmother’s front
room, reading aloud from them, weeping passionately at the beauty and
the majesty of it all, though I had only the vaguest idea what it was that
I was saying. Big emotions, big beautiful phrases, big expansive characters
– it was a better world than any my daily life afforded me, that was for
sure.

School did its best to destroy my love of Shakespeare by reducing him to
a Set Subject, whose works had to be broken down into formulas which
would lead to exam success. Whenever I could swing it, I took the leading
parts in the ghastly droned, fluffed, misinflected classroom readings of
the plays during English classes. Armed with footnotes and glossaries and
starting to become acquainted with the critical literature, I was now,
finally, making sense of what I was saying.

This is the second part of
Shakespeare and Me
, written for the booklet for
my sonnet programme at Stratford, Ontario.

I had at last seen some of the plays. My paternal grandmother had some personal connection with the Box Office Manager of the Old Vic in its dying days, in the early 1960s, before Olivier and his glamorous cohorts stormed its bastions and installed the refulgent new National Theatre Company there. Grandma dutifully took me down the Waterloo Road, and there I began to realise something of the diversity of this author, the different worlds – so very different from that of
Macbeth
– that he had brought to life. And I began to hear the language more and more precisely, not as undifferentiated music but as a succession of images and metaphors with a life of their own.

It always seemed to be somehow part of my life, and my family history – somewhat spuriously, as it now seems to me. In a typically Edwardian association, my maternal grandmother claimed a connection because she and her family had worshipped in St Agnes’ Church in Kennington, at the next pew but one down from Emma Cons and her niece Lilian Baylis, successive directors of the theatre; after the service my grandmother’s family would exchange nods and greetings with the Misses Cons and Baylis. That was the entire extent of the familiarity, but for an Edwardian it was significant, and placed us, in my grandmother’s eyes at any rate, rather closer to the Vic (as she always called it) than ordinary theatregoers. My mother and her brother and sister duly attended plays there, feeling rather special (though they were more often to be found at ballet or opera performances at Sadler’s Wells, that new theatre with an old name which was a late outcrop of Miss Baylis’s missionary passion to spread improving culture to the people). The contact with the Old Vic
claimed by Grandma Toto was more personal, less spiritual: she played bridge with Annette Clarke, Lilian Baylis’s loyal Box Office Manager and later assistant, and this pastime resulted in my father and his brothers receiving free tickets for everything at the Vic.