A Postillion Struck by Lightning (35 page)

Accordingly, one hot July morning, I presented myself at the Works in Whippendall Road, was warmly welcomed, and bustled into “digs” in an ugly terrace house in a long red brick street half a mile away. My landlady, a widow with tight yellow curls and a diamond brooch in her orange cardigan, showed me my room at the top of the stairs, hoped that I'd be “comfy” and said that all meals would be taken in the front parlour with herself and her son, who was a coffin polisher. Tea, she said, would be very soon and she would hit the gong when it was ready. My room, floored with dead brown linoleum, had a wide double bed, a washbowl with jug and a florid brass clock on the mantel which played eight bars of “The Sunshine Of Your Smile” at the hours and, like Bishopbriggs, struck all the quarters.

I learned absolutely nothing during my stay in the Sun Engraving Works. Not for want of teaching; people were wonderfully good and did everything they could to make me comprehend and enjoy the “job” which I was to follow through. Colour printing was still fairly new at that time and it was my father's greatest ambition, one day, to see the picture page of
The Times
in glowing colour. It was, apart from Northcliffe and all the Astors and their Newspaper, his consuming passion. As a very small child I remember, in the studio in St George's Road, my mother standing about swathed in bolts of coloured silks while my father and Logie Baird photographed her from different rooms, I presume, with an early Television Camera. It was all very home-made and it is all rather vague in my memory. However, it was a passion which filtered into the house and into all of us, and I clearly recall the pride and excitement of seeing the first colour photograph ever taken by ordinary stage lighting in a Theatre. It was a glass plate of Pavlova dancing “The Dying Swan” and she received it, apparently with gratitude and delight, according to her letter; that small rectangle of softly coloured
glass (the second one) remained my father's most treasured possession, for it represented the culmination of years of experiment, bullying, cajoling and stubborn insistence for which he was entirely responsible.

But the love was not being transmitted to the son. Although I followed every single process from re-touching to the stapling and final folding of one wretched magazine as it came thudding off the machines, absolutely nothing whatsoever went in to my bewildered brain. I returned to the family home a little thinner, more determined than ever to try and avoid anything whatsoever to do with newspapers, and the cheerful owner of two blue budgerigars which someone in the Print Shop, who bred them, had given me. They had been in the house three days when Minnehaha, the cat, ate them: and vanished as swiftly as my father's hopes of his vision of my future.

A few nights later we drove down to Croydon Airport to meet one of his photographers who was, he hoped, on the last flight out of Prague. Standing in the dark waiting for the plane to come in he suddenly said: “I suppose really that this is a very demanding profession. I think one really has to want to do it very much to make it work … I love it so much, as you know, that I wanted you to share it with me. But it is no good forcing you: I can see that it's got to be something which is in you, and it is clearly not in you. Never mind.” And that was all he ever said. A little later the plane arrived, a long lumbering corrugated iron cigar with wings. His photographer came down the gangway, tie-less, dishevelled, clutching a small case and his camera. He was very distressed.

Driving through Streatham he suddenly said: “Christ! Oh Christ! They pulled this woman off and shoved me on. It was the last plane you see. She kept screaming and crying. I held the door against her, they were all battering at the side of the damned thing, crying, begging. I'll never forget her, I'll never forget her.”

A profession, I thought miserably, that you really have to want to do to “make it work”.

It all stopped with Mr Chamberlain's piece of white paper, blowing in the wind, and “Peace In Our Time”. Joy and relief were so gigantic that no one seemed to stop for a second to consider
whose
time he meant, his, or ours. But it was enough.

Back went the rehearsals of “Journey's End” now even more potent with message. It was a tremendous success. The Hall was
packed for three nights solid, and people came from as far afield as Lewes and Haywards Heath. The emotion among our audiences was tangible. My set (I had been allowed to design it) was highly accurate after my “studies” and my own performance was warmly received. Raleigh is a cinch anyway, but I didn't know that then.

My wretched father, who detested anything which remotely reminded him of his own brutal war, was eventually dragged to see me on the final Saturday night. Sitting with my proud mother he was, he later said, very moved. Not unnaturally. But he still was not about to weaken completely on his decision about my career. An actor's life was still not discussed.

“Was I really all right?” I asked my mother.

“Yes really, you were very good indeed. I was proud.”

“But when I hit that damned plate on the table and it flew into the audience …”

“That was
when
I knew you could be an actor, darling, you let it go as if you had meant it to go. No one moved in the audience, you know, no one at all. You had controlled the move and made them feel that it was true, and not a mistake.”

“It really was all right?”

“That's what acting is all about,” said my mother. “Convince yourself and convince them. Never one without the other.” She was not entirely accurate, but near enough. And without quite knowing it. “Always Applauded” was stirring it up with a vengeance.

In October 1938 Elissa Thorburn, an elderly lady of moderate means, built and opened a theatre in a buttercup field just behind the Station and next to the Coach Terminus, at Uckfield. I had noticed, riding about the area with Nerine, the red brick form take place, but had quite thought it was to be a new factory or a building for the Public Works. It was, however, to be “the most modern, comfortable, best designed theatre in Sussex”. Miss Thorburn had bullied and cajoled money from various sources, mostly her own, and the theatre opened with a shrill of local publicity and a performance of “Noah”, by Andre Obey. And she used real actors from London, not us amateurs. Except that we were asked to come along and help out by playing Crowd or small parts for which she did not pay. The First Night was
splendid with the Reigning Families and anyone else who could afford the not excessively cheap price of the seats.

Unhappily Miss Thorburn had already started to alienate the Local Council by refusing to put on plays which she considered suitable only for the, what she called, Hoi Poloi… that is to say, no “Rookery Nook”, no “Charley's Aunt”. It was to be “The Dramatic Glyndebourne,” she said. And made a slight error here to start with. Never alienate your Local Councillors who consider that they are not Hoi Poloi but like a good “Rookery Nook”; and don't choose a small market town which never even went to the local cinema except on wet Saturdays and then only if “Tarzan” was running or the Home Team was playing Worthing at Bolton. The local councillors were bewildered by “Noah”, insulted by the unhappy phrase “Hoi Poloi” and hated the cold, brick, functional theatre behind the Railway Station. Theatres, they reckoned, for the money that they had all contributed, should be gold and red and filled with a “good bit of family entertainment.”

Not for them translations from the French about a Biblical figure, set in a cold warehouse. And having to wear a black tie as well in the weekday evenings was asking a bit too much all round. However they did notice that there was no central aisle, and therefore there could be an infringement of the Safety Regulations. But that point came a little later. For the moment only the anger mounted. One day, passing the theatre in as casual a way as I could manage, I found the doors open and wandered into the cool, dark, auditorium.

One working light gleamed on the stage. A tall, tweedy, woman was painting, not very well, a canvas flat. Seeing me standing among her brand new seats, only one play old, she straightened up, waving a paint-brush in my direction and told me to be off.

“Shoo!” she cried. “Shoo!” Her hair had fallen round her face like straw; she was hot and cross. I stood. “What do you want with me? Be off, boy!” Her anger was clear.

“I want a job,” I said.

“What kind of a job …?”

“paint scenery. I'm an artist.”

“I don't need a scenic designer … Are you strong?”

I said I was and she told me to come across the seats and on to the stage and together we manhandled a large Austrian stove into a corner. I stayed the rest of the day there, painted a number of
flats, screwed the handles on to a chest of drawers and accepted her grudging offer of a shilling an hour when I worked.

Over the next few months, in all my spare time and every weekend, I went to the Uckfield Theatre and worked with Miss Thorburn to get the place ready for the Spring Performance. It transpired that she had seen me in “Journey's End”, having used as many of the NADS as she could, to save money and “to give them valuable experience” in the production of “Noah”. Covered as they had been in furs and masks I had not recognised any of them, but that was not of importance. They were, I reckoned, amateurs whereas I already earned my way and was doing it as a dedication. The new production was to be “Glorious Morning”, a heavy play about a Democracy being invaded by a Fascist State. It didn't bother me one way or the other until, with one bright eye on expenses, she offered me a part and said that she would pay me five shillings a performance. The fact that I was twenty years too young for the role didn't worry either of us; however I did agree that a black leather coat, a hat and a heavy moustache, would assist me in my “performance”. We finished off the sets, rigged all the lighting together, and by the time the Real Actors arrived from London, at the end of April, we were ready to go. Except for the rehearsals which she, as director and producer, and soleowner of her Dream, would conduct personally.

I arrived, that first morning, long before anyone else. I was excessively nervous and it was also my job to open up the theatre, arrange the stage for the reading and see that there was lavatory paper in the lavatories and a packet of Typhoo tea in the little kitchen. There were also a dozen cups and two packets of Crawford's Custard Creams. I parked my bike by the scene dock, opened the Theatre, seeing the wide beams of sunlight streak across the blue velvet seats, set the “props” and took my copy of the play out into the buttercup field and sat under a giant oak. I felt that, as I was just about to commence my Acting Career, it might be wiser not to sit anxiously huddled on the bare stage too eagerly waiting, but to go and sit in the fields and start it all off from the peace and the calm of the country which I so loved. When they were ready, I reckoned, they'd come for me. Never be over anxious.

Someone came ruffling through the long nodding grasses behind me, whistling softly. I looked up from my script. A tall, well built, smiling man of about thirty stood before me looking
oddly out of place in the buttercups dressed, as he was, in a double-breasted suit, brown suede shoes, long white cuffs with gold links and a rather faded carnation in his buttonhole. One of the actors for sure.

“Hullo,” he said. “Do you work here?”

“Yes. At the theatre. I'm an actor.”

“So am I. I hate First Readings, don't you?”

I didn't know but agreed. He offered me a piece of barley sugar which he assured me was excellent for energy and also for the voice. We started to walk towards the Theatre, a brick box glinting in the morning sun; there were people wandering in and out of the doors. My companion started to breathe deeply, throwing his arms wide as if he was about to take off and fly over the town. I was still wearing my cycle clips and we laughed as I pulled them off and shoved them into a pocket.

“My name's Wightman,” he said. “William, but they call me Bill. I just think I'll have a quick pee before we go in, do you know where it is?”

I told him and watched his tall, burly figure going round the side of the Theatre to the Gents.

My first counsellor and adviser had arrived.

The weeks which followed, up until the opening of the play, were filled with joys and excitements. The other actors, with the generosity of their kind, welcomed me into their midst and we all settled down as one tightly knit company. An oddity of living which only actors seem to be able to achieve. This effect of permanence in a very temporary situation.

Bill Wightman became our leader; he was always jolly, kind, patient, amused and also the possessor of a modest, but adequate, private income which he always most generously shared with us. He also had a car, which, locked into the quietness of a pretty dull, if pretty, country town, was absolutely essential and proved a much needed escape for us all to rarer places like Eastbourne, Brighton or even London. Quite apart from his own considerable personal charm, warmth and wisdom, Bill's car was the Pipe in Hamelin, if he could be called, as he was, the Piper. But he was as much sought after for his advice and counsel as any of the more obvious pleasures which he could give. Every young Actor, or Actress, is plagued by the most appalling doubts and fears and only another actor can really share or understand them.