Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  It was fortunate indeed for me that after “Esther Waters” I was quickly bundled into another film, and then another, leaving me no time to panic and ensuring that if the first was a disaster, which it was, there would be a second and third chance coming up. Which there was. And Rank picked up the option after the first year, increased, very modestly, the salary, and hustled me off again on a second round. It says a great deal for their patience and belief in their investment. Totally miscast in “Waters” and lacking any screen personality whatsoever, I did not, as they hoped, come up to expectations. But by the time that this was discovered I had already played a slightly neurotic pianist in a Maugham short story, and was heavily involved in a love affair with a motor cycle for my role as a Speedway Rider. Which was nearly as dotty as anything I have ever been asked to do in the cinema. And that’s saying something. I, of all people, with my horror of mechanics, machines and speed, was engaged to play the Speedway Champion of Europe. Or something. The director, standing beside a quite enormous copper and chromium bike, told me softly that he would like me to take it home, stand it in my bedroom, and love it as I would a woman.

  I would have been happier with a ten foot boa-constrictor, and could have offered it far more love and affection than this harsh, gleaming, noisy machine on which I was to spend days and nights of agony, fear, and mounting hysteria. Hurtling round and round the track at New Cross Stadium, being towed by a very fast camera car, was as near as I had been to sudden death since the freedom struggles in Java. However, we got through all in one piece and the disaster of “Esther Waters” ebbed away; I was over the first hurdle and I was beginning to enjoy myself But it had taken time, and toll.

  Nan was not enjoying herself. In this new development of my life pattern, I gradually and naturally grew into a new world, and steadily away from my life with Nan.

  I rose at five-thirty every morning and arrived back at 44 well after seven p.m. While I had spent the day with amusing, interesting people, enjoying very much my new-found confidence, and starting a mild flirtation with myself on the Studio Floor which was to last me all my life and become one of the great-love-stories-of-our-time as far as I was concerned, poor Nan, slogging away in a dullish office, coping with meals, the house, Rose (who now broke things daily) shopping and rations, laundry lists and my friends who came for drinks or supper and almost always ignored her, for she was completely lost in our intensely self-absorbed conversations, found that she was being edged further and further away from the life which had seemed so promising when she first arrived.

  One evening I got home a little earlier than usual. I tried to tip-toe past her sitting room (it had reached that stage by now), but she was quickly at the door. Her smile steady.

  “Your sherry’s poured. I heard the car. Or there’s Scotch …”

  “Not now, I’m whacked. I’ll have a bath.”

  “No. Not yet, please.” She had moved into the narrow hall and blocked the way to the stairs.

  “Be kind, Pip … it’s important.”

  Her room was pretty, floral prints, the Meissen bowls on the mantelshelf, flowers, all her books, Cliff asleep on a chair, drinks on the little sideboard, a fire glowing.

  “It’s something I’ve been wanting to say for a long time, and I’m a little shaky, so be patient.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well …” she fitted another cigarette into her long, black holder, “well … it’s not working out, is it? Our arrangement here: it’s got into a bit of a mess.”

  I knew what she meant and what she was going to say. I tried to swerve and avoid confrontation. “Nan! If it’s money … I mean housekeeping, that sort of thing …”

  She flushed angrily. “It’s not that, Pip, don’t be so damned insulting. Money! Hell … it’s us, our attitude towards each other. Or rather yours to me.”

  “What have I done?”

  “I’m just a housekeeper, aren’t I? Nothing more to you. Oh, I know …” she waved her hand towards the pretty room, “I know I have all this; and more, I know that. But I also have pride, Pip. It’s hateful of me to say so, but I have, and I’m rapidly losing it and I refuse to. There.”

  We sat silent.

  “I know it can’t be like it was in India, I know that. Your life has changed so much, and so quickly … and it hasn’t been easy for you. I’ve seen how difficult it’s been, and how you have managed. But you don’t need me any longer.”

  “Nan! I do.”

  “You don’t, dear. You avoid me as much as you can now; we hardly speak at supper … you never come down here for a sherry like the old days. I know that you try to tip-toe past my room, you’d rather be on your own. I do see that, I do understand it, but I can’t really take it any longer. I don’t fit in with your friends … my fault … but I can’t speak the language, I don’t know what half of them are talking about, and it’s always the cinema or what you did today, and I don’t know what you did today because I wasn’t there and you never, ever, ever tell me, do you, Pip? You don’t need me because I can’t help you, arid I can’t help you if I don’t know how to … and if you don’t tell me, or even let me share your life; all you really need is a nice comfortable lady for three quid a week, who can cook and wash and tidy things up for you.”

  “Nan, Nan … for Christ’s sake don’t. It isn’t like that at all, you know it.”

  “It is, dear, and you know it. I’m not utterly stupid. I may not know anything about scripts and lights and what the hairdresser said to the make-up man, but I do know, Pip, that I have a life of my own to live, and if I stay here like this for much longer I’ll be lost and we will end up hating each other for ever.” She smiled gently, and put her hand on my arm to soften the harsh truth of her words.

  I was white with shock and shame.

  “I wish, Pip dear, that I could say, cheer up, it doesn’t matter, but you know that it does. Listen. I tell you what; you have said that you want to get out of London and live in the country … be nearer the Studios … I think that you should; it would be much wiser and healthier for you, and far less of a strain with that awful journey. But I couldn’t come with you. And keep my job in Welbeck Square …”

  The room lay silent. Cliff suddenly yawned and stretched his legs and dozed off again. I could hear the racing ticking of her little travelling clock on the table by my chair. She lit another cigarette from the butt already in her holder. Her hand shook.

  “So I think that’s what we should do.” She pressed the old butt into her glass ash-tray.

  “I don’t honestly know what to say …”

  “There is nothing you need say. We have had a marvellous time together, it was exciting and fun, really it was. No regrets. But we must be very grown up and sensible and not spoil what was so good. Odd, isn’t it? When one gets to these moments in life they always sound like Marie Corelli. Sorry. I’ll stay on, of course, if you want me to, until you find something out of town. It would be difficult for you to break in a servant at the moment; I know the ropes and you’re terribly busy. As soon as you do, give me a bit of warning so that I can get packed up. I heard of a very nice little flat near Baker Street. There is no hurry. I was just poking about, you know, quite a lot of places I can get. And I’d take Cliff, if you wouldn’t mind. He’s got terribly fond of me. Used to me. He’d miss his mother, wouldn’t he then?” She pulled him on to her lap and buried her face in his fur.

  * * *

  It was a modest sign-board in the front garden of an ordinary grey-brick villa, no different at all from its Victorian neighbours on the Green. Ealing Studios. A ragged laurel hedge and, behind the house, scabby turf and three elderly fir trees, beyond them the concrete blocks of the Stages spreading through suburbia.

  Ealing, although affiliated to Rank, was regarded with grave suspicion by some of the impeccably tailored members of the Front Office in the Aberconways’ house in South Street. They scented anarchy on the Green, distrusted the Young Directors and Producers who they felt su
re were certainly all Left if not Communist, and even though the films made a great deal of money they had a Satirical Touch, an Intellectual Flavour, which was disturbing and against all Good Family Entertainment. Indeed I was once told that when the distributors, in a line north of Oxford, saw the trade mark on the credits, Ealing Films set within a little wreath of leaves, they left the theatre in a drove and headed home. Without making a single booking. They didn’t make films which the public wanted to see. So they insisted. And overlooked, conveniently, the fact that somebody somewhere wanted to see them because Ealing was extremely successful, and the cachet of working for them was very important to any actor. This point of view never changed.

  However, Basil Dearden, one of the younger and brightest of the new school of directors, had sent for me, and since they, Rank, had no immediate plans to employ my services, I was despatched to the house on the Green.

  Basil and I had worked together before the war when I was his rather inept Assistant Stage Manager at the “Q” Theatre.

  “You haven’t changed much, have you?” Raised eyebrows, cool regard, fiddling with a pencil on his desk.

  “No. I should have.”

  “Yes. It’s a pity. You’ve got a face like a baby’s bottom.”

  “You haven’t changed much yourself. Just as bloody rude.”

  “My trick. They love it.”

  “Who do?”

  “Bloody actors. All so puffed up. Need a kick up the arse.”

  “Is that what I’m here for?”

  “Could be. ‘The Blue Lamp’; it’s about the Police Force.”

  “I wouldn’t think I was Copper material.”

  “You aren’t. You could play the snivelling little killer. Neurotic, conceited, gets the rope in the end.”

  “That’s me.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Have you seen my film work at all?”

  “No. And I’m told that I am deeply enriched by that lack of experience.”

  “Then why send for me?”

  “Liked the play you did at the New Lindsey … not bad. Do you think you could do something like that? Can you keep it up, I mean? Or was it just a one off?”

  “If I tried very hard.”

  “You’d bloody well have to.”

  “Would you help me?”

  “Not much. Why?”

  “I don’t really know how to act for the cinema.”

  “That has been made abundantly clear, I gather.”

  “So f d need help, wouldn’t I?”

  “If you get the part.”

  “If you get the part. How do you do it … acting for the cinema?”

  “You do the same as you do on a stage, for God’s sake. Nothing different. It’s a lot of bilge that you have to have a different technique for the cinema. Bilge. It’s all acting. Do what you’d do in the theatre and I’ll pull you down if you go over the top. All this nonsense about cinema technique! Bilge. People are trying to invent a myth. Act. It’s simple. If you can.”

  It was the first time anyone had ever told me what to do: suddenly doors and windows opened all about me. Light came in.

  He pushed a script towards me.

  “The role is Tom Riley.”

  “Do you want me to do it?”

  “I need a weedy type … and you’re a Contract Artist. Rank insists that we use some of you from time to time, it’s blackmail. So I haven’t much choice, have I? Always on our necks to use someone out of their ruddy Charm School.”

  “I’m not from their Charm School.”

  “That,” said Dearden rising and hitching up his pants with an ill-suppressed yawn, “is quite self-evident.”

  * * *

  “The Blue Lamp” became a legend, so to speak, within its own lifetime, providing a welter of spin-offs for years to come in the cinema and, later, in television. The Documentary Police Movie. The first of its kind in England. It also altered, for all time, my professional life. Dearden pointed me in the right direction with his illuminating, over-simplified, approach to the camera. It was the first time I came near to giving a cinema performance in any kind of depth: I think it had some light and shade, whereas the work which had gone before was cardboard and one dimensional. I have never been an extrovert actor, always an introvert; instinctive rather than histrionic, and in this semi-documentary method of working I discovered, to my amazement and lasting delight, that the camera actually photographed the mind process however hesitant it was, however awkward. It had never, of course, occurred to me before, since I had very little mind of my own; but the people I played had minds, of some sort or another, and I became completely absorbed in trying to find those minds and offer them up to the camera. I was never to be satisfied again with a one-dimension performance. And neither was the camera, which now became the centre of my whole endeavour.

  If my professional life had taken a turn for the better, the same could not be said of my personal life, which limped on unhappily and awkwardly, ever since Nan had taken up frail courage to throw down her gauntlet. The gentle challenge had to be answered. I was not very well equipped to reply. I tried a new approach to our existence—driving out on picnics at the weekends in the forlorn hope that a day spent by a river, in a wood, or on a hill, would break the tensions of life at 44. Petrol rationing was still in force, and our trips were of necessity limited. And in any case they didn’t work; returning to the shadows of Chester Row with a bunch of cowslips, or aching legs from a climb over Ivinghoe Beacon, did almost nothing to conceal the lightly hidden distresses and frustrations which lay beneath our apparently happy exteriors like trip wires in a mine-field. I was trapped. She was trapped. I knew that I had to get out, away from London and away from the unhappy atmosphere I had, inadvertently, created. Trying, over-hard, to make her a part of my cinema life, as she called it, failed equally. It was not her world, and in no way possible could she join it. She was a sensible, loving creature, and the mounting pressures and demands of this new life, which took us both by surprise by the rapidity of its assault, overwhelmed her. And myself.

  The Indian life we had both shared so happily had all but vanished, never to return. How could it? The people we had been then we no longer were now, and never would be, ever, again. Time had marched on us, catching us unprepared and woefully unarmed. All that remained was a deep bond of mutual respect and affection. Nothing else. And even that was now in danger. So, try to protect it.

  “I’ve found a place in the country, near the Studios. I can move in about September.”

  We were down in the kitchen, she was preparing supper, her back towards me, at the sink.

  “How splendid!” She took a cloth and wiped her hands. “Let’s go into the garden. I thought we might eat out this evening, it’s so warm … the food’s cold so nothing will spoil yet. Have you got your glass?”

  At the bamboo table under the bathroom, set neatly, we creaked into canvas chairs. The last of the sun slanted through the big limes.

  “Where is it, far? A cottage or a castle? I know you.”

  “It’s Forwood’s family house actually, Bendrose House, near Amersham. It’s empty, up for rent. He can’t afford it all on his own, so if his family agrees we could go halves. He wants somewhere for his child, a sort of family base … seems a good idea.”

  She poured herself a gin and tonic. “Of course, there’s the child. But it was a ‘decent’ divorce, wasn’t it?”

  “Very. They are tremendously fond of each other, just can’t live together any longer. You know …”

  The garden was very still. It trembled as a train rumbled beneath it into Sloane Square Station.

  “So he wants somewhere for the boy in the holidays; they are going to share him, it’s all very civilised.”

  “Sounds marvellous all round.”

  “Pretty big. Large garden. Unfurnished, of course.”

  “You’ll manage. Think of all those lovely auction rooms and second hand shops, you’ll be in your element. And y
ou’d go in September?”

  “If that’s all right for you?”

  “Fine for me. I can use my holidays flat hunting. I have my eye on one; a dear little place, quite reasonable, and a tiny bit of garden for Cliff … he’d hate a real flat … I’m glad you told me.”

  “Just had to do it, that’s all …”

  “I know.”

  “And you can come down at weekends. It’s big. Masses of room.”

  “Lovely! And easy from Baker Street; the flat’s just a few steps away. It is on the Bakerloo Line, isn’t it?”

  “Or Marylebone.”

  “Same thing really.”

  “So it wouldn’t be a complete severance.”

  “That would be unthinkable! Never that! Of course not … I’m much too fond of you. It had to happen like this, you know. I suppose I was always aware it would, deep down. It’s just life, as they say, it’s all a matter of ins and outs I suppose. It is, isn’t it?”