by Isla Blair
Shortly after my grandmother (my mother’s mother, Jessie) died, my mother went to her funeral in Prestwick and was to spend a couple of days there. I came down to Horsham from Victoria to be with my father. I was in my last production at RADA and on the point of leaving. He met me at Horsham station and suddenly it was just my Dad and me. There was no mother or sister to be a conduit for our relationship.
It was only a few years since Fiona and I had both parents available to us all the time, but Fiona was well into her training at the Middlesex. Dad had prepared pork sausages, which he grilled with a tentative hand, saying he was making “heavy weather” of it and laughing in a self–deprecating way when they got burnt and split. He had peeled potatoes, which I boiled and then mashed with butter. We sat in the kitchen and ate this feast with tomato ketchup and felt pleased with ourselves and told each other it was very nice. My father had never cooked anything before – really never, not ever. This was his first experience of gas and grills and spluttering sausages; that I was his guinea pig, made me feel like a conspirator in his culinary first. We applauded each other on how delicious it was as we ate tinned peaches and vanilla ice cream for pudding. We talked about his job and how he found the routine rather dull and the commuting tiring. I asked him what he had for lunch. It amazed me that it was always the same; roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, potatoes, beans and cabbage and a slice of apple pie and ice cream to follow.
“How can you always eat the same thing, Dad?”
“Well, dear, it is nutritious and not expensive and we never had beef in India. And we never had apples either.”
No one had beef in India. Cows were sacred creatures. We had their milk, but no one thought to eat them. We had chicken and mutton and on rare and dreaded occasions, there was goat. Fiona and I were both teased for not knowing what apples were when we first went to St. Maray’s.
The day had started shyly, but by the end of it we were laughing and confiding in each other – not deep confidences, but sharing our opinions and thoughts and feelings. He asked me what it felt like to be on stage. He had just been to see me in Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon’s musical “The Two Bouquets” and he said he had loved it and he was proud of me. He thought going on stage would be rather like facing a firing squad. I told him I didn’t understand the need to act, and although it was sometimes frightening, difficult and could be bruising (certainly to receive horrible reviews and to take the rejection), it was also unlike anything else in the world. I told him about the time on board ship and playing “St. Joan” when the audience went quiet and I told him how it felt to play Helena in “Look Back in Anger” with Tony Hopkins at RADA. How I seemed to feel as if things were coming to me from outside – it was like flying, uncertain of where I would land, but just responding to what transpired on the flight. We had rehearsed of course, and knew what we were doing – the moves, the lines, but this was nothing to do with the newly learned technique. Something happened to change the temperature and we found ourselves in a different emotional place, always aware of the audience, but responding to each other, really listening, taking the audience with us, aware that we were sharing a secret with them in a little bubble of time. This by no means happened every time one acted, but occasionally it did and made all the trials and anxieties that went with the process worth the struggle. I was just starting, with so much to learn, so much to wrestle with – and anyway, the feeling seemed to defy description; it was elusive, like trying to catch a shaft of light; I was inexperienced and inarticulate and found it impossible to explain, as I didn’t understand it myself.
I’m not sure my father got it at all, although he tried. It was bewildering to him that I could remember so many lines. Something that actors always have to explain is “How do you learn your lines?” People don’t want to know that that is the easy part. Learning lines comes with practice. I do not find it a nightmare, as some actors do, although I am not blessed with a photographic memory like Derek Jacobi or Stephen Fry. That is an enviable gift.
And so we chatted throughout our day together and had tea and crumpets with marmite and butter and we washed up and he smoked his pipe. He spoke proudly of Fiona and her nurse’s training and called her “a remarkable girl” and he talked with such love for my mother, clearly missing her even though she would only be away for forty-eight hours.
He helped me cut some roses from our garden and we got some sweet peas from Mr Budgen down the road. We picked them together and cut down some runner beans and paid Mr Budgen his money, wrapped the flowers in some tin foil and rested them across the top of my bag and the runner beans we wrapped in newspaper and put into the bottom of my little weekend case.
Soon it was time to say goodbye. Daddy drove me to the station and stood waving until the train went round the corner and we became invisible to each other. I sat back in my seat and smiled at his dearness and how nice the day had been. I could not know then that that was the only day in my life that my father’s company would be exclusively mine.
I enjoyed many days alone with my mother. She would come up from Horsham on the train and we would meet at Victoria Station by the Grosvenor Hotel: the same Grosvenor Hotel where Fiona and I had had brown Windsor soup and rolls and butter before our first flight to India. I would see my mother from afar, because she always arrived early. She was elegant and sometimes wore a beret, but she had an air of vulnerability about her too as she looked out for me, standing alone with her handbag over her arm, twisting her gloves in her hand. We would go to Harvey Nichols or Fenwicks and we would pad up and down New Bond Street and Knightsbridge admiring or tutting over the clothes in the windows. We sometimes went to Harrods where we would get ourselves a light lunch from one of the interior cafes or the health juice bar (just introduced). Only occasionally did we grace the restaurant. In the restaurant at Harrods, oak panelled and rather stock-broker Tudor, models wandered around the tables wearing suits and dresses that were for sale, with little labels with a price-tag on them round their wrists, while music played. We would eat open sandwiches and sip tea and then go round each floor chatting and being companionable. Here was my mother just being my friend. Yet somehow the roles were starting to reverse. I knew London and “the shops” better than she did and led the way to places her imagination had only dreamt of in India: to a beauty salon for a facial in Beauchamp Place, Fortnum & Mason for tea, where a late middle aged, rather effete man in 18th century costume – complete with white wig, a black patch and eye makeup – teetered around the tea tables chatting to the elderly ladies and “making their day.” The afternoon tea at Fortnums at that time was not very nice, leaden scones and tea that tasted of hay; usually we would go to the Ceylon Tea Centre and there we were never disappointed.
On one occasion, I decided to pick my mother up in my new car. It was a bright orange mini and had a black drop head roof and a number plate that read 8PUR. It was an adorable, funny, cheeky little car and I whizzed about London in it believing I was one of the swinging, cool, mini-skirted trendsetters who was about to change the world. The mini – the car, not the skirt – stayed with me for many years until one day, on a drive back from Horsham, the battery fell out onto the road at the Robin Hood roundabout.
The plan was to meet my mother in a road that ran beside the Grosvenor, open the door to her and whisk her away to San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place for lunch, then to Harrods. I felt grown up and responsible for her, for her pleasure in the day, for showing her this new London that I was starting to discover and I was in the driving seat after all!
I was early. Her train wasn’t due to arrive until 11.15 and it was only 10.00 as I found myself driving through Belgravia en route to Victoria. I slowed down and parked. What lovely little shops, a bakery that wafted delicious smells, bread and – new to me – chocolate croissants; a vegetable shop with aubergines, courgettes and red and yellow peppers in boxes, laid out on pretend green grass on little trolleys on the street; there were fat garlic bulbs and brown onions – it looked familiar
, like the bazaar in Munnar or Cochin, but I hadn’t seen such exotic vegetables in England before.
There was a charming shop, later to be called a boutique I daresay, with one dress in the window, a dark deep blue, the colour of the night sky in the tropics, beautifully cut, elegant in its simplicity. Although I could never afford such a dress, what harm could there be in going in and having a little look around.
The carpet was white and deep, the counter was white with a bowl of full blown cream roses resting on it. The air was delicately fragranced with Jean Patou or Guerlain and only a few dresses and jackets hung from the rails protected from hands like mine by thin sheer veils of cellophane. I started to look through them and noticed labels I’d heard my mother speak of: Dior, Balmain, Chanel – here was the poshest of posh shops. I was still leafing through the clothes when a woman with a chic black bob straight from the ‘20s (early Vidal Sassoon probably) in a very short black dress appeared and looked at me enquiringly. I think I appeared guilty, as if I had no right to be there – she thought so too as she asked, “Yes, Madam, may I help you?”
“Oh, I’m just having a look about, if I may.” There was a silence you could drive a doubledecker bus through.
“Madam, this is a dry cleaners!”
I made for the door, feeling sick with humiliation, and out to the safety of my little orange car. How could I have been so clutzy and unsophisticated? It was only when later I’d collected my mother and we were speeding to Beauchamp Place, and I told her of my gaff, that we both started to laugh. I had to stop the car as we laughed and laughed and because she, my mother, was with me, it became funny and not embarrassing.
Sometimes we would go to a matinee and at the interval, if ordered beforehand, small trays of tea and biscuits were handed down the rows of the audience and we would sip and nibble and discuss the merits of the play. We were companionable, we were friends, we were mother and daughter doing things mothers and daughters do together.
We would go Christmas shopping too. We’d look at the decorations in the shop windows, the lights in Regent Street and we’d buy secret things for each other’s stockings – sugar mice (my mother had a collection of mice, as that was her nickname, Mouse) and chocolate Santas, bars of soap and glass tree decorations. We’d have mince pies for tea and toast each other with our tea cups. We would people watch and play the “he looks just like...” game. She was always enthusiastic, always appreciative of small gestures of kindness or thoughtfulness, always ready to laugh.
There was an element missing though. Fiona. She had done her three years’ training at the Middlesex, her midwifery course, when an opportunity came to work at the King Edward VIII hospital in Bermuda with some of her newly-qualified SRN-ed friends. It was a long way away, the other side of the world from England or India, where her days would start just as our days were ending. There was much debate about whether or not she should go and finally it was decided it was too good an opportunity to miss, and besides it wouldn’t be for long.
And so my companion, my confidante, my sister who had always been at my side through thick and thin, good and bad, was to step out of my life for a bit. I felt unreasonably aggrieved and a little fearful – how would I manage without her? I knew in my soul I was being illogical and selfish, my career was up and running, why should Fiona not take this chance? And she did. We waved her off at Heathrow where she went through the departure gates alone and her tears fell straight onto my heart like battery acid and I kept hoping she would change her mind, turn round and come back. But she didn’t and she looked tiny and vulnerable as she walked into her new life thousands of miles away.
Christmas was spent without her, just the three of us in Horsham, and we toasted her and realised at that moment she was probably fast asleep. I could feel my throat close up a little as that familiar little lump of loss and missing lodged itself there. I had never felt it for Fiona before – well, not since those early days in India when she went off to school without me.
Most weekends I’d go home to Horsham. I was still getting used to the concept of home; my home with my own room which was painted the softest primrose yellow, with venetian blinds and green and yellow curtains and a little creamycoloured bedside lamp on a small table by the bed. There was a wardrobe where I could hang my clothes, just my clothes and not share the space with anyone else, and a chest of drawers where I could keep my jumpers and knickers and stockings and I could put tiny lavender bags in between them and in another drawer I could keep my diary and letters, photographs and my film star albums and the glass bangles and the bracelet with the four leafed clover and all the treasures that weren’t treasures at all, really, but just things that were mine, which in the past I’d had to trundle about; I could keep them here in my home forever if I wanted to, even though I had a flat in London. There was a bookcase where I could keep all my books and the plays I would probably never be in – Tennessee Williams and Noel Coward and Eugene O’Neill – much read. It was good being able to keep them there in case I needed them. Good being able to keep them there even if I didn’t.
NINETEEN
Lemons, Laundry and French Tobacco
I’ve fallen in love twice in my life. Both times it has been at first sight, in an instant. When I fell in love for the first time, I was 21 years old and my career was going well. I’d just finished a six–month TV series for Granada and I was repeatedly being asked to do musical theatre. But I had in mind a different path. I wanted to learn about Shakespeare, Chekov and Ibsen – in fact, all classical theatre – and so I signed a contract with The Prospect Theatre Company to do a new play about Dr. Johnson, James Boswell and Mrs Thrale called “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” (I was to play Fanny Burney and double the role of Louisa, a mistress of James Boswell). There was another play called “Thieves Carnival” by Jean Anouilh (in which I was to play the ingénue). The cast included Timothy West, Julian Glover, Martin Potter, Sylvia Sims and James Aubrey. I confess I hadn’t heard of any of them, except Sylvia Sims, a bit of a heroine with her blonde hair, good bones and blue eyes – I remembered “Ice-Cold in Alex” and how simply lovely she was.
We assembled in a rehearsal room in Victoria on the 22nd May 1966. May had been hot, everyone was tanned and in shirt-sleeves and cotton blouses. I was nervous meeting “proper” actors, not that the actors I had worked with before weren’t “proper”, but these ones felt high poweredly classical.
A tall, rather gangling man came through the door. He was blond with a determined chin and a roguish smile. He stood in the doorway waving greetings to Tim and to Toby Robertson, our director. The sun shone on his blond hair and made it seem to glow. He was wearing a French workman’s blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up and jeans and a navy blue cashmere jumper slung round his waist. We shook hands and when he looked at me, something happened to my legs. I gradually became aware of the scent of him, lemons and freshly laundered shirts and a whiff of French tobacco. This was Julian and I will never forget that moment.
Julian came with baggage though. Being ten years older than me and newly divorced from his wife of nine years, Eileen Atkins, some of the baggage was heavy and would cause me a bit of anguish in the months to come. Not only had he been married to Eileen, but he had left her to have a relationship with Sarah Miles, a beautiful, wild and unpredictable 60s icon. Although the bruises from these break-ups didn’t show, they were there under his skin, close to his heart and he felt them. How could I possibly enter the frame with a brilliant actress (Eileen had just won the Evening Standard Award for “The Killing of Sister George”) and a beautiful movie star – for I knew in that instant that my heart no longer belonged to just me. It was being stealthily and invisibly lassoed by this man in the denim shirt and however hard my head tried to convince my heart to slow down, it floated away – all caution thrown into the shafts of sunlight in the doorway on that hot May morning.
I’d always said that I had to marry a man whose voice was strong, mellow, rich and low – although I
’m not sure I specified the qualities when I was ten years old. I just knew my husband had to have a good voice; good voices mattered. So often handsome men have been spoilt by high pitched or sibilant sounding voices; their masculinity reduced to Minnie Mouse squeakiness, rendering them, to my ears, a bit ridiculous.
Julian
I remember doing a film in Glasgow and standing in the lunch queue behind a huge 6’ 6” red-haired highlander with bursting biceps and a red beard of spectacular effulgence. A Viking, a formidable fighter at Culloden, was the character he presented. He had hands the size of tractor tyres and arms that had clearly tossed many cabers. It was his turn to step up to the serving hatch of the catering van to be asked by the caterers what he wanted for his lunch. His voice, falsetto, as if he had just inhaled helium, came back with, “Have ye any cheese toasties?” It was a struggle not to laugh. I’ve always been disconcerted by high pitched voices in both men and women and won over by deep, rich melodious tones. Julian’s voice had all the qualities I liked. I just knew I wanted to listen to him all the time.
