Odd boy out, p.24
Odd Boy Out, page 24
I watched his eyes behind his spectacles, scanning the rows.
‘And when they’ve all seen your eyes, you can start.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘In this play you’re doing at Bedales –’ as he said the word, he made it explode – ‘for your first entrance, where do you come on?’
‘From up there, sir,’ I said, nodding towards the back of the stage on my left.
‘And how do you come on?’
‘Well, I just come on.’
‘Oh, dear boy, you can’t just “come on”. You want to be no-ticed, don’t you?’
‘Oh yes, sir, I want to be no-ticed.’
‘Well,’ he said, swaying slightly as he spoke, and pointing to where I was to make my entrance, ‘I suggest you come on backwards.’ Again, the word exploded. ‘They always notice the fellow who comes on backwards. You can be waving to someone in the wings – you see, the movement of your hand will attract the audience’s attention. Come on backwards, spin round, let them see your eyes, and speak your line. You’ll be noticed.’
‘That’s wonderful, sir,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Thank you! And you, sir, if you were making your first entrance, where would you come on?’
‘Oh,’ he laughed softly and rolled his eyes. ‘I can come on anywhere!’
15. Holidays
While I was away at school, having a high old time with my plays and my projects, my hit-and-miss love life and my schemes for improving the world, what was happening at home?
I’m not sure I can tell you, I’m afraid. I wasn’t really concentrating. Like most adolescents, I imagine, I was totally self-absorbed.
As I mentioned earlier, my move from Betteshanger to Bedales in 1961 coincided with the family’s move from Kensington Mansions, off the Earl’s Court Road, to Portman Mansions, off Baker Street. The new flat, in a similar Victorian red-brick block, was a little smaller than the old, a little darker, and the ceilings weren’t quite so high, but it had a lift – not a wholly reliable lift (if someone on another floor failed to shut the lift gates properly the lift wouldn’t move) but a lift all the same. At Kensington Mansions we had been the only flat on the top floor. At Portman Mansions, we were on the third floor, Flat 5H, on the right. On the left was Flat 5G, the home of Dr Schindler, an elderly Freudian psychoanalyst who looked exactly like one of the two old men who used to sit in the stage box in The Muppets. We met him occasionally on the landing and tried to make small talk, but it wasn’t easy. He was Viennese and his accent was so thick it was impenetrable.
Throughout the 1960s, Pa, now in his fifties, carried on working as the AA’s legal adviser from their headquarters in Leicester Square – only three stops away on the tube – and Ma, I am happy to report, began to come into her own. During the war she had taken a course on nursery education. Now she took another (based on the teachings of Maria Montessori) and opened her own small nursery school in the front room of our flat in Portman Mansions. My brother Ben was the first pupil, but others quickly followed. Soon she had a dozen or more toddlers running all over the flat, their pushchairs cluttering up the hallway, the Montessori play equipment (the sandpit, the water feature, the climbing frame, the letter boards, the shape and number blocks, the wooden boxes in which the little ones liked to hide when they were feeling shy or sad) filling every available cupboard, shelf, nook and cranny. Ma was an outstanding teacher, and when Ben started having difficulty with reading and she discovered he was dyslexic, helping children with dyslexia became the overriding purpose and passion of her life.
At Portman Mansions Ma’s schoolroom was the first room on the right – the largest and lightest room in the flat. Mine was the first on the left. At Kensington Mansions I had had a bedroom and a playroom. I did not feel I needed a playroom any more. From the age of ten, I did not feel remotely like a child. I regarded my new room not so much as my study as my office. I packed away my costumes and my puppets, and set up my office – complete with desk and swivel chair, typewriter, bookshelves and a large metal filing cabinet Pa found for me in a second-hand office furniture shop on Tottenham Court Road. When I was home, I could happily spend all day and all night in my room, making my plans, writing my plays (given our new address, I started with the Sherlock Holmes mystery in which I cast Simon Cadell at school), listening to my records (Salad Days was no longer running in the West End, but I was still playing the record ten times a night, if not more). I wasn’t antisocial: I emerged at mealtimes or to play the occasional game of Scrabble with Ma or one of my sisters.
Immediately opposite my room was the sitting room, furnished quite sparsely by middle-class standards – two Ercol armchairs, a leather pouffe, a utilitarian sofa (that was also a put-you-up bed) covered in a rather grim grey fabric, two side tables, a standard lamp, a central light (a single bulb with a shade that looked like a Chinese conical hat), and over the mantelpiece a large print of one of Canaletto’s famous paintings of Venice – a souvenir of the educational cruise Ma and Pa took for their silver wedding anniversary. We watched TV in the sitting room. Ma loved the Billy Cotton Band Show. Pa enjoyed Panorama. We did not have ITV: a lot of middle-class families didn’t, in those days.
Down the corridor were the girls’ rooms, my parents’ room and, with linoleum on the floor, the kitchen and the bathroom. I see Pa most vividly in the kitchen, either sitting at the large Formica kitchen table (pale green) with his cup of tea and his cigarettes, going through the accounts, or standing by the sink, with a kitchen towel tossed over his shoulder, doing the washing-up.
Were they happy together? I always assumed so, but now, writing this, I have begun to wonder. How well do we know our parents in the end?
Pa was a successful lawyer, a well-regarded broadcaster in his field, and an equable and amusing man, but he had his money worries and his professional disappointments, and he was forever at Ma’s beck and call. (‘I need another cup of tea, duckie.’ ‘Yes, hon.’) As a teacher, Ma was totally fulfilled, but she can’t have been wholly happy, can she? If she had been, she wouldn’t have retreated to her bed so often. And she wouldn’t have struggled so much with her weight, and her headaches, and her bad back. The osteopath was always coming around, as I recall. And I have just noticed, looking through my diaries now, a couple of references to Ma’s ‘black bombers’. That’s what Pa called them. They were large pills that Ma took from time to time. I realise now they were anti-depressants.
One of Ma’s problems, as I have mentioned, is that she was insecure socially. You would not have thought so if you had met her, but she must have been. Perhaps Pa was, too. He was gregarious and outgoing to the point of eccentricity at work or when we went out for a family meal – thinking nothing of climbing up on to someone else’s table in the restaurant to take a better group photograph of us sitting at ours. He would return from a visit to the Garrick Club with tales of the interesting men he had encountered – often Oxford contemporaries of his – but he never brought any of them home. Now I come to think of it (for the first time), the only outsiders I can recall ever coming to our home were either relations of my mother (chiefly my hard-drinking Canadian Uncle Jack on his annual visit, or my painfully shy Anglo-Belgian cousin, James, who could sit in silence in the corner of the sitting room for the whole of Christmas Day), schoolfriends of my mother (who had either never married or married into a lifetime of disappointment), or former colleagues of my father who had fallen on hard times. There was an elderly solicitor who had been disqualified (he looked positively Dickensian: he felt the cold and wore woollen mittens even in summer), an Anglo-Indian doctor up on a charge of buggery (I think Pa helped get him off), and my favourite, a sweet man called Michael King, of mixed-race descent, whose father had been a distinguished West Indian barrister who had befriended Pa when he was starting out at the Bar. I knew Michael for fifty years, but I never found out what he did or where he lived, so when my parents died I couldn’t inform him – and when he died, I didn’t know. He was a regular visitor to the flat and joined us, too, on outings to the Players’ Theatre underneath the arches at Charing Cross. Whenever Ma left the room, he’d murmur, ‘I’ve always admired a woman with a fuller figure. As far as I’m concerned, the fuller the better.’ When he said it, it sounded charming not creepy.
These quaint friends – all wounded animals of sorts, I now realise – came quite often for lunch or tea. I don’t recall seeing any of Pa’s relations at the flat or any of his professional colleagues. I do remember the night the vicar and his wife and daughter came to dine. The ladies came in long evening dresses. The vicar wore black tie. We ate (cold meats and salad) in Ma’s schoolroom, perched on tiny chairs, sitting at Montessori play tables. It was agony.
I can’t remember if my sisters were there that night or not. Everyone came and went quite easily because the key to the front door hung on a piece string inside the letter box. (I marvel that we were only burgled once in ten years.) The girls were six to ten years older than me, of course, and beginning to lead their own lives. Jennifer had graduated from London University and was studying criminology at Nottingham, I think, and planning to become a probation officer. Virginia was now a qualified nurse, still at the Middlesex Hospital where, I remember, Hugh Gaitskell, the Leader of the Opposition, died in January 1963, aged fifty-six. Ginny was looking after him and admired him hugely. Hester was thinking of taking up nursing, too.
Hester still had her problems. I remember the evening during the Christmas holidays in 1961 when we found her on all fours in the sitting room, barking. Ma didn’t know what to do, so retreated to the kitchen. Pa didn’t know what to do, either. So with me at his side, he went next door to find Dr Schindler. ‘You’re the expert,’ said Pa. Whatever Dr Schindler replied we did not understand, but he kindly came over and tried to talk to Hes to calm her down.
Hester would have none of it. She turned on the good doctor and tried to bite his ankle. The poor man ran back to his flat, terrified. Hester seemed a lot better after that and was quite normal by supper time.
The one thing Ma insisted on – whatever the state of the family finances – was a proper family holiday, preferably on the Continent. In the summer of 1960, for example, we drove all the way to Bavaria, to the village of Oberammergau, to witness the famous Passion Play. It lasted seven hours. The benches were hard and the dialogue was in German, but it was a collector’s item and even as a child I liked collecting those. The villagers of Oberammergau have been telling the story of Christ’s passion every ten years since 1634. They started doing it as part of a pact with God to protect them from the bubonic plague. It worked – until 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced them to postpone it until 2022. Everyone in the village takes part in the drama, and members of the same family play the same roles, down the generations. The house we stayed in belonged to a family whose members always played the part of Judas Iscariot. ‘We’d better leave our suitcases locked,’ said Pa. ‘You can’t trust these people.’
That was a happy holiday. I remember us setting off from London at 3.30 a.m. to catch the 10.45 a.m. ferry for Dunkirk, then on Pa drove – to Bruges and Ghent and Düsseldorf – with Ma sitting next to him folding and unfolding the maps and squawking at every intersection along the way. We stopped overnight in Bruges and went for a walk through the flower market before having supper at Le Cornet d’Or. I had sole meunière and then chocolate mousse. I remember it still as the best meal I have ever had.
In Düsseldorf we stayed with friends of my parents who were the exceptions to the rule: they were quite normal. John Paice was my godfather and stationed in Düsseldorf with the British Army on the Rhine. My parents had got to know the Paices when they were in Germany with the Allied Control Commission around the time I was born. Their son, Peter, a little older than me, was the Guardian (or head boy) at Gordonstoun when Prince Charles arrived to spend his unhappy years there. Peter I always think of as the epitome of a thoroughly decent sort of English chap. He was tall, handsome, athletic and effortlessly well mannered, as well as a little hard of hearing. He always called his father ‘sir’. I never did that, but I rather admired him for doing so.
I vividly remember the couple of nights we spent with the Paices because in my bedroom on a bookshelf I found a copy of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and spent much of both nights reading it. As you know, the novel (reckoned by some to be the greatest of the twentieth century) tells the story of a middle-aged man who falls in love with a girl who is twelve. I was twelve. ‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.’ Intriguing, I thought. Is this how Mr Glading thinks about me?
Not every holiday was as rewarding. In the summer of 1964, for example, I spent all of August in France and was unhappy for most of the time. It was a bucket-and-spade holiday in Brittany and quite fun to start with, but by 13 August, according to my diary, I had had enough.
We are in Dinard. Pa is going home tonight and I am staying here with Ma and Ben for ANOTHER TWELVE DAYS. I am staying very reluctantly and only after ghastly scenes. I want to be in London where I have WORK TO DO and PEOPLE TO SEE. I have been in France since 29 July and I am now more than ready to go home. Besides I have just endured TEN DAYS IN HELL. I have been to ten countries in ten days. It might sound like fun. It was anything but!
What happened was this: Ma, Pa and Ben stayed in Dinard, enjoying the sun and sand, while I was sent off in the family Ford Cortina to spend ten days travelling around Europe with, as my driver and sole companion, my eighteen-year-old cousin from Canada. Cousin Johnnie was the son of my mother’s brother (my hard-drinking Uncle Jack) and he had come over from Toronto ‘to do Europe’ before going to university. He went on to have a career as a prison governor and one of the leading lights in the Canadian correctional system, but I am afraid when I was sixteen I did not take to him: ‘He is a very nice chap and all that, I’m sure, but HE AND I HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON – and he eats with his mouth open, making the most revolting noises.’ As we travelled I wanted to visit theatres and cathedrals and buy books. He wanted to find ‘Hitler’s bunker’ – truly: ‘Hitler’s bunker’ in every one of the ten countries we visited! – and the only items he wanted to buy were picture postcards of big-busted beauties in bikinis sitting on beach balls. These cards he duly sent to his assorted girlfriends back in Canada.
The whole thing was a nightmare. On the first day we drove to Nantes and picked up a Dutch hitch-hiker called Jan who persuaded us to drive to the coast to a bar in Pornic where he said we would find Jean-Paul Sartre ‘because he is always there’. He wasn’t. The three of us slept sitting up in the car in a side street. After we had got shot of Jan, for the next ten nights, we spent every night sleeping in the car. I slept on the back seat, but the seat wasn’t long enough – so I had to sleep with my feet sticking out of the window. Cousin Johnnie spent the nights in a sleeping bag beside the car ‘looking at disgusting magazines and doing unspeakable things’. I accused him of being sex-obsessed. In Marseilles he drove us round and round the red-light district, honking the horn, trying to make the prostitutes come out of their flats to wave at him.
We sped through ten countries:
France
Spain (we fled almost as soon as we arrived, thinking we were being pursued by the police – Cousin Johnnie stole a painting from a street market in Llançà, ran down the road with it, jumped into the car and drove off)
Monaco
Italy
Switzerland
Austria
Germany
Holland
Belgium
Luxembourg.
The driving never stopped, but our conversation did. I came to hate him so much that, after a while, I couldn’t bear to sit next to him in the car. I sat directly behind him instead. We played a word game for hours on end and I cheated – using a dictionary behind his back – so that I won every time. It drove him mad.
On our travels I didn’t spend any of my spending money. I saved it all, so that on the final Monday, on our way back to Dinard, when we stopped in Paris, at Magasins Réunis, I was able to buy all the books I wanted: Baudelaire, Molière, Sartre, Cocteau − in each case, the complete works in paperback. (More than half a century later I still have them all. I have barely looked at them, of course, but I love to see them on the shelves and, now and again, I pull one out, flick through it and breathe in the smell of the pages. I still find the Livre de Poche smell irresistible.)
Buying the books – that was something. And in the interests of accuracy, I should mention one other good day. Towards the beginning of the trip, on Saturday 1 August, near Aix-en-Provence, I visited Paul Desorgues, a former French teacher from Bedales, on his family farm and, after lunch, tasted the sweetest, juiciest, most perfect peach you can imagine. It was the taste of a lifetime. And in the evening, in Avignon, I went to see Corneille’s Nicomède at the Palais des Papes.
Johnnie went looking for Hitler’s bunker.
From the age of seven until I formally left home when I went to university, I had at least one holiday a year in France on my own, always travelling there and back unaccompanied, sometimes staying for as long as six weeks.
When I was younger, I spent several summers with a very nice French family at their holiday home in Normandy. (I remember Odile, the tomboyish daughter of the house. I liked her, and I liked the breakfast: a ficelle of French bread spread with salty butter and covered with squares of black chocolate. The Ferrands were serious Catholics. We never ate before Mass, and the father of the house always made a small sign of the cross on the loaf with his knife before cutting into it.) I stayed with another nice family in Maine-et-Loire. The Rouillets were military types and a bit grander. I don’t think any of the children were my age, but I remember swimming in the Loire, jumping off the riverbank into the fast-flowing water, and loving it – which is odd because, as a rule, I avoided anything that smacked of exercise. In 1960, when I was twelve, I stayed with a French couple in their apartment on Avenue Wagram, off Place de l’Étoile in Paris. They had no children, but I did not mind. I was happily self-sufficient. I visited museums and walked the streets by day, and went to the cinema and the theatre by night. Brigitte Bardot, Fernandel, and Jean-Louis Barrault were my holiday companions.
