Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  She came down to the docks with me. My exceedingly small L.S.T. was almost ready to put out for the long journey. It was the same farewell as always: the bright, uneasy chatter, the beating heart, the false bravado.

  “Just remember …” she fiddled with the buckle of her sandal which had come undone, “ …just remember. I’ll be going home in about a month, I think … you have my address … my sister’s house? Well, it’s just that when you get back, if you need anything, or if there is anything I can ever do, just … well just …” the buckle came off in her hand. “Hell! Now I’ll have to hop about looking for a taxi. But I mean … if you want me, just give me a call …”

  * * *

  So who, but Nan?

  She came right away with three suitcases and her old tin trunk, a pile of books, and a cardboard box with a collection of doubtful Meissen, Augustus Rex, plates and saucers, and moved into the first-floor two rooms. Sitting room on the street, small bedroom over the garden, sharing the bathroom and the dark kitchen below. She had kept on her nine-to-five job because all I could offer was the accommodation and six pounds a week for housekeeping and Cliff, who took up his place in the house on the end of her bed. And we managed very well.

  No more Weetabix and cheese. No more lonely suppers under the May tree. On two ration books we fared far better, and she knew a shop in Lancaster Gate where she got black-puddings and haggis and split peas and lentils and God knows what other delights. I began to eat properly, and was happy to do the washing-up in return. Walls got repainted, window boxes planted, the neo-Georgian furniture was arranged and rearranged and arranged again. I spent a lot of my time, and more money than I could afford from the Oxo tin, in junk shops up and down the King’s Road; it was still, then, almost a long village street, with an ironmongers who sold hooks and bolts and pounds of nails, a haberdashers which sold woollen combinations in winter and muslin blouses in the summer, and a greengrocers spilling with cabbages, lettuce, green peppers, mud, and garlic. But the junk shops were my best place, and for a very few pounds, and often shillings, I carted back suspect Old Masters in heavy gilded frames, domes of stuffed birds shimmering with dusty feathers, cracked coffee pots and sets of odd glasses, jugs and bits of Staffordshire which, all washed and mended, suddenly gave a feeling of false richness to the sagging, margarine yellow house.

  Then, just before the play finally closed, we attacked the garden, cleared all the rubble, whitewashed walls, pruned and cut and heaved the sour earth out in sacks. With the assistance of an old man with a cart and donkey whom Nan met in Elizabeth Street, we filled the place with geraniums and tobacco plants, laid out a lawn in strips of emerald turf which cost a fortune per sod, set out tubs of white daisies and fuchsias, and dined by candle light nearly every evening at a small bamboo table under the bathroom built out on two iron columns, long before anyone had ever been to Spain and learned to call a yard a patio.

  “Power Without Glory” closed at the end of May due to a lack of star names on the canopy and the excessive competition from the energetic Americans across the street in “Oklahoma”. But I was not immediately worried, nor even sad. Everyone was moving on into Coward’s new play, and I had my Contract. At the end of June the retainer money ceased and my salary began right away. I was to receive the unheard-of sum of three thousand pounds a year, with yearly options on their side to renew.

  I bumped up the housekeeping, paid five pounds for an enormous 1938 Hepplewhite-style H.M.V. cabinet gramophone, with doors and lid, and decided to have a house warming party to show everything off. Including myself

  Lusia came, my catalyst from the Savoy; Freddy came, Forwood came, Chloe Gibson and all the cast came; Mr Daubeny even arrived, with a bottle of whisky and one of Vodka (“Gin is quite démodé, only sailors and servants drink it”) which helped to swell the modest delights on my bar (Pimms No. 1, Pale Ale, and a bottle of Madeira from the wine shop at the corner). I wasn’t that rich. Yet. My parents came from Sussex, and Elizabeth came with George from the RAF. And a bright-eyed, slender little woman came who looked rather like a blackbird with a hat and veil. Her name was Olive Dodds, the Contract Artists’ Representative at Rank. My first real Official. This was the woman who was to push me, or steer me, whichever needed doing, through the Paradise-Hell of the Cinema Jungle. She it would be who would part the thorns and brambles and strangling vines, suggest new tracks, new directions, when to move, when to lie low. She would bring me to the very brink of chasms and then dare me not to jump; to catch me on the other side, breathless.

  She raised her glass of Madeira, lifted her veil, and looked around the room with its family portraits from the junk shops, bowls of flowers, worn Persian rugs, and drank to my success.

  “Not what I imagined; not a Film Star’s House.”

  “A criticism?”

  “No. A comment only. Meant kindly.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Oh … off white … chromium … stripped pine … a Utrillo reproduction … Peter Jonesey.”

  “Well, it isn’t. And I’m not a film star …”

  “Yet. I’m rather afraid that you soon might be.” She cocked her blackbird head smiling gently. “I wonder if you’ll like it?”

  “Won’t be for ages.”

  “You’ve got your name above the title on your first film. Technically you exist as a Star, my dear. Very good luck.” She lifted her glass and sipped gently.

  “Sounds like a threat.”

  “Another comment. That’s all. Some people take to it like a drunk to drink, with much the same results.” She fumbled for a cigarette, I lit it for her, she blew smoke into a steady high column. “Some others get hopelessly lost. It is not easy. Let me know if I can help. That’s what I’m there for. I’m called The Shoulder. For weeping on.”

  * * *

  Forwood arrived one morning for coffee and said that the lease was running out on his Mews Cottage and that he was going off on Tour for four months and had nowhere to store his bits and pieces. Nan instantly offered him the top front room with the bulging wall for a pound a week, storage rate, and a few days later he moved in his Medici print of the Amaryllis, his grandmother’s petit point chair, books and boxes, and a set of silver forks and spoons which Nan shoved into the kitchen. My brother Gareth, picked to play my “son” in “Esther Waters” and presently at a loose end, moved into the small back bedroom next to it. I bought a second-hand Sunbeam Talbot, gold, with a drop-head, and acquired a chauffeur, since I would not drive, called Bond, ex-Coldstream Guards, very tall, very fast, from an ex-Serviceman’s agency. My household, including Rose of the gull-like voice, was complete, and No. 44 was bursting at its seams. I was flying. Without wings.

  Giddily, like a run-amok balloon, I sailed and swirled happily into the void, no pilot in my gondola, all tie-lines severed, the sand bags jettisoned, filled only with hot air and the false, delirious, sense of freedom. Up I flew into a sky so dark with storms and dangers, so fraught with stresses, rumbles of distant thunder and silent flashes of lethal lightning that anyone, but myself, would have had the wit to turn back, land safely and enter a Closed Order.

  But that was not my style. My adventure had begun and I really rather liked it all. There was one gentle, worrying doubt, however. Just one. Who the hell was I? More important still, what was I? Like people of an immigrant race, I was searching for my identity, although I was not at all sure what I’d do with it when, if, I found it.

  So who was I suddenly? I had known, to be sure, who I had been—the brave little Captain, the hopeful novice actor—but now there was a vast vacuum and in spite of a house, a car, all my family and possessions such as they were, I belonged nowhere. Unproven, except for one modest performance in a failed play, as an actor, and worse still, in the brand new life which I had entered, quite unproven as a man.

  Old friends, such as I had, began to fall away. This is something one has to get used to: they leave you far quicker than you leave them. They go because you have move
d ahead and they feel, usually correctly, that they are not able to keep up. As it happened I had very few old friends. Some, like Forwood, like Lusia, who had known me for many years, stayed close, because they understood the way the journey was going, and were unsurprised; but most of the others drifted away, even Vida. Uncomfortable in my new-found riches, embarrassed by my sudden new classification, so far completely undeserved, as a Film Star, they left me to get on with my new inheritance. The trouble was that I had no friends there either.

  The people I had to mix with now were the established ones—they all were film stars—but they were proven. Their conversations were too hard for me to follow: I knew almost nothing of what they discussed. Having no experience of their world I desperately sought to establish myself in their eyes as someone they were sure to find interesting, delightful, clever and sophisticated. But I had no possible way of doing this except to chatter away about my war. The only thing I knew anything at all about—and no one in the world wanted to hear my stories and sagas and bragging. The war was over, the war was dead, and glazed eyes greeted my desperate efforts at self-assertion. Or was it only re-assertion? I can’t be sure. But I knew that I bored them witless, and in desperation, and in fear, I started to drink too much, hoping that this would give me courage when all it gave me was a blinding hangover every morning and an over-exaggerating tongue the night before. I should have sat quietly, humbly, patiently, listening to them—they had something to teach me had I cared. Instead I beat about wildly in the seas of terror, and struck out like a drowning man at everyone who tried to come to my rescue. Including poor Nan, who was unmercifully clobbered simply because I felt I loved her well enough to do so.

  A grave, and cruel, mistake.

  Insecurity, that overworked word, swamped me. And swamped the new friends who leant backwards to make allowances and gave unheeded advice, which I desperately needed, and who finally moved away as determinedly as the old friends. I was very much alone for a great deal of the time. Which gave me, between beers, a good deal to think about. For thankfully, I did know that I was behaving appallingly, and I did know why. I just couldn’t correct … or connect.

  In the Studios, unable to join the top echelon, because of my own limitations, I graduated downwards in scale and made friends among the rag-tag-and-bobtail of the profession. People who would listen to my endless bleating for the sake of a double gin in the bar, or who would come to supper simply for a free meal and a shrewd feeling that they were being patronised, which most of them were.

  At these suppers, which Nan prepared devotedly and constantly, after a long day’s work at the office and at which she played an uncomfortable role as hostess, I happily played the role of host to my Court of small-part actors, extras, fifth-string hairdressers’ assistants and noisy girls from the Publicity Pool at the Studio. I enjoyed their flattery, inaccurate gossip, false deference, and above all delighted in the respectful silences in which they patiently listened to my wild, improbable, theories about a profession of which I knew absolutely nothing. It’s just that they made me feel Big. I laid down the law, in my own house, and all my trite little witticisms, if that’s what they were, received bright laughter and heavy slaps on the back as someone reached again for the Vodka. Only Nan was distressed. And she did her best not to show it. Tight-lipped, but incredibly polite and charming, she served the food and drink and sought for some level of conversation in which she could safely join, in the intellectual desert of my drawing room on the second floor.

  Her forced laughter, her worried eyes, her ill-concealed concern for me irritated constantly, and it was at those moments between us that I would start off on my Bore War and invent, and decorate, to astonish and gain support from my Court. My immodesty horrified her; and although I did, with little grace, assist her in the kitchen later with the washing-up, we hardly ever spoke, and indeed spoke less and less, for I would brook not the slightest criticism of my new friends. I needed their sycophancy and fed on it for my courage. And she knew only too well how dangerous this would be. I resented her wisdom, her cautions, and put it all aside furiously. I had been Small for too long, I thought. I enjoyed being Big.

  So they fawned on me for my pathetic favours, borrowed money easily, invited me to grubby drinking clubs to which I went eagerly (anything now was better than sitting at 44 with the evening paper and Nan cooking a pilaff in the area), and all the time I knew that I was going the wrong way about things and desperately sought some form of balance. Even Freddy really couldn’t help—he gave advice which was so sober that I immediately, and foolishly, rejected it—and Nan knew nothing of my profession, or how it worked or what it demanded. Her chief concern was that I should be happy, well fed, cosseted, loved and that she should be proud of me. Which she, blindingly, was.

  Shyness has crippled me all my life; now coupled with a quite desperate desire to prove myself in my new profession, impatient for the results, I developed a cold arrogance to protect myself from the world of which I was now a part, but not truly an accepted Member. The worst, and most sickening part of each day at Pinewood was the lunch hour. I knew no one well enough to eat with. I had no set table. Like a new boy at school I sat miserably in my dressing room reading the script and not eating, or forced myself to go to the bar, which meant running the gauntlet of the great restaurant beyond which lay the bar itself and Eadie in shiny black satin who smiled at me and always talked about something. But in order to make this voyage I had to go blind and deaf and walk, like a robot, swiftly through the chattering, crowded tables, looking neither right nor left, eyes fixed in desperation on the wooden door behind which lay a temporary salvation to loneliness, with Eadie.

  This caused concern among the diners. One day I was summoned by telephone to present myself at Earl St John’s office at twelve-thirty. He was genial, quiet, polite. Olive Dodds was also present. Silent. My first encounter, since the days in South Street, with my Headmaster. He handed me a note wordlessly. It was a mild complaint, suggesting that perhaps Mr Bogarde might be asked not to walk through the restaurant each day as if he owned it. It was signed David Lean.

  My mouth was dry, my hand shook. I apologised to Earl St John and Mrs Dodds and stayed alone in my room from then on. Until I found a way to get to the Bar through the gardens … which saved running the gauntlet.

  One day there was a gentle knocking at my door. Two shining faces, the Attenboroughs. She with a white halo hat, smiling brightly, clutching a little purse. He with the alert, boyish smile, eager eyes, brimming confidence and infectious zeal of someone who had just seen a vision. For a blinding moment I thought that they might have been collecting for the Salvation Army.

  “Hello! Just wondered if you were on your own; or simply not eating? This is Sheila, my wife. If you are on your own we just wondered if you’d like to lunch with us? The first couple of weeks are awful; like a new school. I mean if you need any help, want to know the teachers’ names, where the class rooms are, that sort of thing, we’d be delighted to help you. Or just give you lunch?”

  Their kindness winded me, their thoughtfulness nearly unmanned me, it was so completely unexpected and I have cherished it always. But it was, of necessity, an oasis only. I couldn’t presume on them every day, and saw to it that I did not.

  One evening Forwood came to dinner with his wife, Glynis. Although they had mutually agreed by this time on a full separation after all, they were still extremely fond of each other. Nan was tremendously excited and made a splendid meal. I bought two bottles of Hock, and we lit candles. But their visit was, as it happened, not entirely social. They came to instruct, to correct, to help. I sat frozen with shock at their gentle, considered, constructive advice. I was behaving badly, they both knew why and sympathised, but I had to pull myself together pretty soon or disaster lay ahead. “You talk too much, you exaggerate constantly, you are boring, rude and self-opinionated,” said Glynis flatly. “And people don’t like that kind of behaviour in this profession. You haven’t done a sin
gle thing yet and yet you behave as if you knew it all and had nothing to learn. A little humility wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. You are supposed to be a professional, try and behave like one.”

  Shattered by the truth, unable to defend it, I heaved an empty Hock bottle through the enormous aquarium full of tropical fish which stood at the end of the room. Cascades of water and weed, rocks and fish shot across the floor. Mixed with my uncontrollable wine-and-anger tears. They left shortly afterwards, picking their way through the wreckage of the fish tank and the shards of my ego.

  Nan came clanking up the narrow staircase wearily with the buckets.

  * * *

  “What I can’t understand,” said Forwood a few days after this sorry episode, “is why you just don’t be yourself. Why this sudden determination to emulate Genghis Khan, for God’s sake? It’s a good role. I agree, but you aren’t ready to play it yet … by a long chalk.”

  “I don’t know who ‘myself is … I did once … you know that … but now it’s got all muddled, and anyway being ‘myself in this business won’t do. They want more than that.”

  “A lot of self-pitying twaddle. If you knew who you were once you can be it again. It got you through twenty-six years perfectly well. You seem to be going through a male menopause or something.”

  Glynis and he started work on me as if I were an unmade bed, stripped me down to the box-springs, turned the mattress, aired the blankets and, with my unconfident, but anxious, assistance, we started to put it all back together again. Not a moment too soon. Under their wise guidance, calm advice, among their own carefully-selected friends, who to my hidden surprise neither patronised nor ignored me, I began to regain the confidence within myself which I had somehow or other lost along the line. It had all been a case of too much too soon and not being able to carry corn.

  Work started on poor “Esther Waters” proper, just after this, and that too helped to restore a sense of balance. I found that being myself, whatever that was, worked far better. I did my best to be pleasant, polite, humble and above all, with Glynis’s terrible, and accurate, warning ringing constantly at the back of my mind, professional. Life became a good deal happier. At least I was just being me. And me seemed to be all right; if dull. I applied myself assiduously to the job in hand. Indeed I had to, for no one else was applying me. On the first morning of shooting on my first Epic, thirty years ago, I timidly (being myself) asked Mr Dalrymple, the director and my discoverer, what, exactly, I should do. I had never really seen a film camera before, apart from a few brief moments for make-up and costume tests in which no histrionics whatever were required on my part. Mr Dalrymple looked rather startled, and pushing his glasses high up on his nose, he said, very politely indeed: “My dear boy! I don’t know. I’m the director, you’re supposed to be the actor,” leaving me nothing else to do but whistle hopelessly as I groped about for a lead line. It was the first time that I would hear this, but not the last. So, like the swimming baths at Maidstone, I held my nose and jumped, hoping that someone, or something, down in the dark water would come to my salvation.