by Isla Blair
I said we were to have the best, most elaborate Christmas when the time came, with a huge tree hung with glass icicles, silver balls and tinsel and we would buy the most beautiful fairy for the top, or it could be a star, shiny and silver, but it had to be the most beautiful, for it was to be ours, our very own tree, not shared with other people, but our tree with our very own decorations on it. Daddy laughed and scratched his head in the way he did when he was nervous or anxious – I was just learning these little mannerisms and they were becoming dear to me. “We have to be a bit careful, dear, as we don’t have much money.”
I had missed my parents from that hollow bit inside me that only now was filling up with emotional vitamins. I had memories of my father’s smile and his pipe. I’d held my mother’s fragrance in my head for so long that she had become an image, a mind-photograph – with her blonde head resting against my father’s shoulder. The real person, whilst just as lovable, was a constant surprise. There were so many things about her of which I was unaware; that she couldn’t whistle, that she hated milk and – worse – junket or yoghurt. That she didn’t shave her legs, but used a little pad like a soft emery board that she would rub round and round; she wouldn’t pierce her ears and her clip on earrings would hurt her and leave little red marks on her lobes. I learned that she loved marshmallows and chocolates (I share her affection for the latter). When she didn’t like something – coffee, champagne, oysters, red wine – she would say it disagreed with her “I love it darling, but it doesn’t love me.” I’d stand beside her in church on Sundays and hear that her voice was lilting and sweet, I don’t remember going to church in India. I’d not often heard her sing before, just things like “Baa baa Black Sheep” and “Twinkle. Twinkle Little Star” and “The Girl That I Marry”, which we sang together, along with “The Road to Mandalay”. But in church she sang out clearly and I was touched and rather thrilled by the quality of her voice. “You should have been a singer, Mummy, like Granny.” And she would smile and stroke my hair and say “Oh! Darling.” And I have no idea if she felt wistful about it or not.
“What would you have liked to have been if you had had a job, Mummy?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I would like to have been an archaeologist I think, and go on digs and find exciting things, even ordinary things, sometimes the ordinary things are the exciting things. I was good at geography, and started to learn about geology when I was taken out of school, but I never learned any science, so of course I could never really have been an archaeologist.” Although she never voiced it, I sensed that she minded about her loss of education.
“What about you, Dad? Did you dream of becoming something when you were my age, or did you always want to go back to India?”
He’d puff on his pipe, smile and scratch his head and say:
“I’d have liked to have been a banker or a stock broker. But if I had been, I’d never have met your mother.”
These conversations always came back to that, that his life properly began when he met our mother and his daughters had made things complete for him. I asked him why he had given Mum a blue zircon ring when Fiona was born and that my birth had not merited a gift.
“Did you want me to be a boy? Were you very disappointed that it was me? I know you had a boy’s name all ready. Alan Stewart. Well, I have to say, I am jolly glad I wasn’t a boy if you were going to land me with a name like that.”
“No,” said my father scratching his head again.
“I never wanted you to be a boy, I wanted two girls. I wanted you to be you and here you are.”
“Yes, but I must have been a disappointment after Fiona,” I said – fishing for a further confirmation of his love – “because when she was born, you kept a book about her for a year, well Mummy did, about how much she weighed each month and when she first walked and got her first tooth and the first word she said and stuff like that, and there was no book about me. Mummy can’t even remember what time of day I was born.”
“There was no book about you, dear, because it was the war and we weren’t at home in the High Range. I was stationed in Bangalore when you were born in a hospital, not like Fiona, who had a midwife, Truttie, to help her into the world. You were in the Lady Curzon Hospital and a very grand doctor called Colonel Aspinall delivered you at about 10.00 in the morning. I wasn’t there, but Mummy told me all about it. I went to see you with Fiona as soon as I could and there you were with Mummy and you were sucking your thumb. I was so proud of Mummy for giving birth to someone, my daughter, who was already clever enough to suck her thumb.”
“That’s nothing,” your mummy said. “She’s been sucking her thumb since she was half an hour old and when Colonel Aspinall came in, he asked what we were going to call you. Isla Jean. We named you after a river in Scotland and there’s a Glen Isla too and Jean just seemed to go with it. Colonel Aspinall said, ‘Good gracious, with a name like Isla Jean Blair-Hill, she will have to be a film star.’”
“Did he? Did he really say that?” I was delighted. “You see, that’s what I’m going to be, an actress.”
I wanted so much to sit on Daddy’s lap, but I was too grown up for that and it would have embarrassed him, I think. Physical affection did embarrass him; I suspect if I’d been a boy he would have shaken my hand at greetings and farewells; as I was a girl he kissed my cheek and patted me on the back.
He asked me what I liked about acting, having told me for the umpteenth time what an unstable profession it was, full of rejection and disappointment and scathing criticism. I replied that it was hard to explain, but I’d try.
“It’s as if a little door inside me clicks open and I can release all my feelings through somebody else, that the character I am playing, while different from me, still has my voice, because I am saying her words. I try to imagine how she will be feeling, even if I’ve never had an experience like hers and I bring something from my own life and emotions into hers to make it real, so that people are seeing me, but I will be a sort of cipher for her. Oh, it’s too difficult to explain.”
“No, go on,” said Daddy.
“Well, when the audience goes quiet and I feel they are feeling what she might be feeling, when I make them laugh, or feel sad, it is as if they are sharing our emotions – mine, mixed up with hers; sometimes I feel as if she is acting, being, feeling outside my control and I become more her than me. And at the end of the performance, I feel sort of cleansed. I’m not explaining it very well. I’m not sure I can explain it at all.”
“I can’t pretend to understand it, dear, but I see it means a lot to you.”
“It does, it does. It’s strange, but when I’m being somebody else, is when I feel most myself. I’ve got to be an actress Daddy, I’ve got to be.”
“Well, we’ll see dear. Your mother and I will look into it, but meanwhile study hard at school; you’ve got to cover your options. Perhaps you can do a typing course, just so that you have got that behind you.”
It was best not to argue. But I think he understood more than he admitted.
I was learning tiny details about my father, too, that other children would have grown up knowing about theirs. He didn’t like cheese and he ate too many Polo mints and gave himself mouth ulcers; he was not fearful of snakes, tigers, leeches or spiders, but he was nervous of bats and moths and wasps (he swallowed one as a boy and it stung him in his throat which became swollen making it difficult to breathe). He loved watching and listening to birds and he thought keeping them in cages was a cruelty which he couldn’t abide. He invested small amounts of what tiny savings he had in stocks and shares and he bought the Financial Times every Saturday. He wore a tie every day of his life, Brylcreemed his unruly hair each morning, refused to wear after-shave, but sprinkled lavender water on his breast pocket handkerchief. He was strongly superstitious – would allow no peacock feathers in the house and would never buy or hire a green car deeming it unlucky and accident prone. On a home leave, on one occasion, he had to have a dark green little Austin,
as it was the only car available. When he was involved in a minor accident he, of course, blamed the car.
People often ask me why I didn’t have things out with him, about his decision to leave us behind in Scotland when he and my mother went back to India – but what was the point of asking the question, when I knew the answer? It was something that all of us Raj children knew. That was what was done. I just felt it was a time to get through as well as I could without them. And I did. Perhaps I wasn’t always as sanguine about it then as I am now looking back, but I don’t think I was unduly disappointed if they missed a concert, a sports day or a little milestone; I accepted it, although sometimes I wished I was just a girl with a Mum and Dad who turned up for things like everyone else. But I got over it and, who knows, maybe gained strength because of it.
Before we became settled there was much to sort out, come to terms with; life in England took some adjusting to before we felt even vaguely secure. My parents had to find somewhere to live, but my father also had to find a job, any job, but which should come first? The house or the job? As a tea planter, even as the manager in headquarters office (which he had been for several years), he did not qualify for many jobs in England, not even as a postie in Auchtermuchty. Eventually he was employed as a clerk in a small firm that made ladders in Slinfold near Horsham. My mother washed his shirts and made him tea in the room at the Station Hotel as she looked out at the rain and the endless greyness of November days. It was very different from the High Range.
Thereafter my parents progressed to a room in someone else’s house as paying guests, near to where my father worked, right out in the country. It must have been acutely depressing for my mother. She didn’t drive then and there wasn’t any transport to speak of to take her away from the dripping leafless trees, the chatter of her landlady and the unheated bedroom that was all she could call home.
England was not the welcoming place my mother had looked forward to and she felt lonely and isolated. England was, after all, an alien country to her. not yet her home. Like all of us, she had faults, and on several occasions she drove me wild with irritation. She could be vain and she could be indolent (as indeed can I), but self-pity was not one of her faults. She never complained as she read cook books by Marguerite Patten and tried to follow the recipes. She had never cooked before, as she had been in India since she was thirteen years old, where people had cooked for her. She learned to dust and polish and scrub and wash clothes, darn socks, and to do all the things most of us learn before we are ten. My mother was forty-two years old.
At last they found a small bungalow in Horsham with a large garden full of trees, that they called The Estate. Their house cost £2,500 in 1959, the first proper home they had owned, loved and lived in until my mother’s death in 2005.
The ladder firm in Slinfold closed down and my father had to find other work. He wrote countless letters and had just as many rejections (your age ... so long abroad ... lack of qualifications ...). It was a bruising time, rejection always is, and he started to get dejected. But my mother wouldn’t allow him to plunge into anxious self-pity.
“We can live on soup and bread, we have the girls, we have this house and something will turn up.”
It did.
At the age of 52 my father got a job as a junior clerk in the firm that made Wright’s Coal Tar soap and he commuted daily to London Bridge, rising at 6.00 a.m. and getting back at 7.00 p.m. It must have been trying in so many ways – the loss of status, getting used to the crowds and the unreliable trains and just the length of hours. But he had my mother to come home to and that made it all worthwhile. On one occasion during my school holidays he came home, tired of course, but with his face wreathed in smiles. He had won the office sweepstake of £15 – quite a considerable sum then. He handed £5 to my mother, £5 to Fiona and £5 to me. That gesture in that snapshot of time has stayed with me, as it was so typical of him.
The days started to get shorter and the leaves on the trees got crinkly and brown round the edges and some were already turning yellow and I knew it was time to go back for my last year at West Preston Manor. I was quite looking forward to it now that our family was together. Even if we weren’t physically together, if we were all in different places, we were still together somehow. No stiff chins and pebbles in the throat feeling as we waved goodbye. My parents were here as part of our lives now. They lived in England not India; they were home. India was left behind a closed door.
Going out days at school were quite different too. After church on Sundays we would come out in our grey and blue uniforms with our panama hats on, still smelling of incense and virtue and there they would be on the other side of the road from the lychgate of the church, standing by their new car, a little Ford Prefect, Dad pulling on his pipe, wearing the now familiar tweed sports jacket and Oxford Bag trousers and there would be Mum in a dark grey coat, her blonde, shining head hatless. She would smile and wave and I would pretend to be cool, when in fact my heart was racing.
“There they are, there are my Mum and Dad,” I’d say, trying to be casual to Sally Kingsmill or Sheila Gaffney, and I’d feel like any other girl whose parents had come to take her out for the day.
In my last term, the summer term, on going out Sundays I was allowed to get on the train home for the day from Littlehampton and I passed through all the tiny stations until I came to Horsham and there would be Dad wearing a jacket and tie, puffing on his pipe of course. I’d hug him before I ran down the steps of the station in front of him and out to the waiting car.
Mum had usually been to the WI market on Friday and came home with armfuls of fresh spinach and squidgy meringues. I’d only just started to like spinach, fresh spinach being so different from the creamed sort that came out of tins and tasted of bad breath. She’d make a special raspberry blancmange and we would have it with fresh raspberries, meringues and cream all squished up together. After lunch we would saunter up to the top of the big garden and look out for the fox hole under the big fir tree. Dad would say “Damn foxes,” but Mum would tell him how much she loved them, especially when the cubs came out at night to play, and that was usually enough for him. Mum’s regard for them was the foxes’ reprieve.
At St. Maray’s I learned that being Isla was a very unsatisfactory person to be. I had too many faults that needed correcting – even at West Preston I was told there was a great deal of room for improvement. But I began to learn from my parents that they felt differently. It was enough for them that I was Isla they never wanted me to be anyone else and even at my most toxic teenage grumpiest they accepted me for myself. Knowing that your parents believe in you, trust you and admire you gives you a sense of confidence and wellbeing, a proper sense of yourself. I felt more blessed in this than many of my school friends who saw their parents every day.
On clearing my mother’s loft and her desk after she died, I came across a cardboard box that had once contained an electric blanket, and in it were cuttings from newspapers, reviews, photographs, postcards from me, poems I had written – yellowing now and curled at the edges. But they told me of my parents’ pride in me, and their love that had no conditions at all.
FOURTEEN
Number Four Hundred and Eighty–Four
West Preston Manor days passed quickly. I played many more roles in school plays – Saint Joan of course, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Coward, Shakespeare. I even played a few men, including Edmund in King Lear, with a moustache, and solid Brutus, not charismatic Mark Antony, in Julius Caesar; they both walked like a flat-footed, rolling hipped, enormous-bosomed girl.
Miss Boykett and my parents wanted me to go to university but I ardently put the case for drama school. Although my father knew of my passion and he felt we had already made a deal, RADA was the only college my parents had heard of, so it was decided I’d audition there and if I got in (I was the only one with confidence that I might), they would not go back on their word and they would support me. Not financially, though. They were unable to do that, so it
was imperative that I should get a grant from West Sussex County Council.
Before I went for the big audition at RADA, I had to audition for three men, local officials in navy blue suits, in a dark room in Chichester. They sat behind a long table and asked me why I wanted to be an actress. I found it much more difficult to explain this to them than I had to my father; I said something idiotic, like I felt it was God’s plan for me. To their credit, they didn’t blink and asked me to do a couple of speeches. I felt self-conscious and nervous and a bit humiliated that these elderly men should decide my future. What if I got a place at RADA but failed to get a grant? I remembered to smile and say thank you before I closed the door on their deliberations. I went over my speeches every day when I was alone, but I didn’t really know how to prepare them. I relied on the emotion, the feeling coming to me, and some days it didn’t. I felt dry and detached. Other days I overacted and had to stop myself and start again. I knew the lines backwards and could have said them in my sleep.
