by Brendan King
The Arts Educational School in Tring, Hertfordshire, was directed by two enterprising Jewish women, Grace Cone and Olive Ripman, both of whom had been ballet dancers before turning to teaching and education. Joining forces in 1939, they founded the Cone-Ripman College, with the aim of preparing students for a professional life in the arts, combining a general academic education with specialized training in dance, drama, music or art. It wasn’t the most exclusive of private schools, but at £65 a term it wasn’t exactly cheap either.
The school was housed in a rambling old mansion previously owned by the Rothschilds.6 Although its large reception rooms made for excellent dance studios, the sheer size of the building had its drawbacks, especially in winter when the dormitories were bitterly cold.
Beryl’s first day wasn’t encouraging. After travelling to London by train, she made her way to Tring by coach and it was dark by the time she reached the school. An administrative mix-up meant she had to share a room with two older girls, not in the main school itself but in a draughty building that had formerly served as a stable. When one of her fellow boarders told her to make up her bed, Beryl was mortified that she didn’t know how, her mother having always done it: ‘I turned my back and fiddled with my bedding and looked at the name tapes my mother had sewn on to the blankets, and tears came into my eyes.’7
After a few days the mix-up was discovered and Beryl was moved back into the main school. Even so, she found her first weeks at Tring something of a strain. Her antipathy to dance, and ballet in particular, was not calculated to endear her to her teachers. Grace Cone was a dangerous person to get on the wrong side of. Julie Andrews, who attended the school in 1942, prior to its move to Tring, described her as ‘a real martinet’,8 while another former pupil recalled that she ruled the school ‘with a rod of iron . . . she was feared and respected by all’.9 Beryl’s tap-dancing teacher was equally imposing: ‘Miss Mackie was a tough woman and quite cruel’ and had ‘no tolerance for anyone timid or unsure’.10 When she picked on someone she could be relentless.
This was Beryl’s first experience of living away from home and the combination of alienation and physical discomfort prompted an immediate flurry of anxious letters to her parents and her brother Ian, who dismissively tried to make light of things: ‘I don’t know why you want to come home. If I was away on a holiday like you, I’d jolly well be dreading the day when I had to return home.’11
Beryl may have missed her old life, but her absence was also being felt by those who remained. Shortly after her arrival at Tring, Ian sent her a letter, written in the arch, slightly condescending tone he often used with her, that wittily captured the new state of affairs:
Dear Twirp,
It is now eleven days since you departed from the austere precincts of this house to the more austere environ of your present abode. That eleven day old event has altered the whole place, I might even add body, soul and mind, of family life here at home.
First let us deal with our parental antecedent. No longer having a Communist-Conservative in the house . . . the political fermentation has considerably decreased. In its place has developed a completely new procedure. The ‘Manchester Guardian’, that stalwart publication of a decayed body politic (and maybe heralder of a new and triumphant liberalism), is violently torn from its habitation in my newly-acquired brief case, even more violently turned from Crossword page 2 to Political page 3, & opened out so as to form a barrier between the reader and the outside world; then follows a series of ‘umphs’, ‘Peshaws’ and (exasperatedly) ‘I don’t know’, emitted by the aforementioned reader during the course of his perusal of the proceedings in Parliament; then, as if the burden of the whole world’s problems lay upon his shoulders, this modern Atlas verbally attacks, in the most heated manner, the cause of the earth’s troubles, namely his loving wife and dutiful son. The only one to escape his scathing remarks is his faithful companion, that illustrious member of the canine race, Pedro.
Secondly, our maternal predecessor. This starving outpost of the Housewives’ League eats only three eggs a day, half a pound of swine’s flesh, a pint of milk, innumerable cups of tea, each one with a piece of cake or a biscuit, and sleeps 23 hours a day, rousing herself for the odd hour to listen to Twenty Questions, Country Ramble, Itma, or Merry-Go-Round.12
The volume of letters that criss-crossed between Formby and Tring during this period is truly impressive. Winnie, Richard and Ian all wrote to Beryl every Sunday, with Winnie often adding another letter or two in mid-week. Beryl also regularly received letters from Lyn, Harry, her foreign penpals, public school friends such as Richard Malthouse and Neil Briggs, former schoolfriends from Merchant Taylors’ such as Annette Moore and Rita Moody (‘How’s Harry getting on? Are you still in love with him or have you got your eye on someone else! Knowing you, you will most probably have another one as you are a big flirt . . .’),13 and from a range of Formby admirers. These included Albert ‘Lochie’ Riley, one of the porters at Formby railway station (‘I miss you of a morning . . . I am going to Bed in a minute I wish you could come with me . . .’),14 and Jim ‘Bang’ Seaford, an eighteen-year-old squaddie (no. 10 on her boyfriend list).
Beryl was, if anything, an even more assiduous correspondent and at one point had to be reprimanded for writing too frequently: ‘You seem to be going through a fortune on stamps,’ her mother complained. ‘Darling, you needn’t write every day. How about writing about three times a week say, or perhaps twice and you could give me all the news in those letters just the same?’15
The lightness of tone of Richard’s letters, written in the mock-Irish accent he had taken to using with her, seems to belie the harsh portrait Beryl would later paint of her father:
My Darling Berry,
Sure Im delighted ye got my little note & liked it. Its a very worried world I find meself [in] nowadays what with having no one to help me on Sunday morning & no one to shout at its terrible, terrible it is me child.
Ye can see from yer mother’s letter that she’s give you all the news & never a devil she cares about me but never mind me darlin I love you very very much. Are you in need of money, let me know, and let us know when we can come & see you.
With fondest love
Ye olde Daddy.16
In their contrasting styles, the letters Beryl received from her mother and father offer an insight into the influence that each had on her writing. While Winnie’s are full of gossip, local news and the latest scandals, dissecting the subconscious motives behind people’s actions, Richard’s letters are more imaginative, driven by narrative and even fantasy. Beryl’s departure from Goodacre prompted him to begin a series of fictional tales concerning Uncle Len and the pig he’d just acquired, which for the purposes of his stories he called Professor Hugo. The first instalment in January started out as a simple flight of fancy, but ‘the latest doings of the LenHugo pair’17 quickly became a weekly ritual and the saga continued off and on until the spring of 1949. Many of the stories ran to five, six or even eight pages of closely written foolscap and seem to have been written at a single sitting. A short extract suffices to give an idea of their tone and intended comic effect:
I understand yer dear Uncle Len has repented in his heart and granted a respite to his pig ‘Hugo’. He has now made Hugo his personal attendant and friend. He insists upon Hugo accompanying him wherever he goes, which is very touching and sweet to see. Such devotion by these two to each other brings tears to the eyes of passersby. Picture to yourself yer Uncle in his upstanding manner clad in his Brown tweed plus four suit with ‘Hugo’ Black coat, old vest and striped trousers, walking along the main streets of Liverpool. I know to you it will not appear funny, understanding us as you do, but on Wednesday next both yer dear Mother and Auntie Lilian have objected very strongly against Hugo coming. Now for the life of us, neither yer Uncle or meself can understand the reason for such insulting behaviour to Hugo, for both he and Uncle have promised not to get drunk so long as they are allowed to dance together
.18
Nothing highlights the difference between Richard and Winnie’s temperaments as starkly perhaps as the letters each wrote to their daughter at the end of February. While Richard was carried away by his story about the goings-on of Uncle Len and Professor Hugo the pig, Winnie clearly had no time for such fancies: ‘Poor old Hugo was murdered yesterday and Uncle Len has lost his playmate. Nannie is now busy cooking the bits & pieces.’19
By February 1948, Beryl had begun to adapt to school life,20 though she was still prone to bouts of insecurity about her parents, which Winnie tried to assuage: ‘Darling, you haven’t any need to worry about me. I am feeling loads better and Daddy has been marvellous since you went away. He misses you dreadfully and often says how he would love to have you here just to argue and fight with. His politics need airing and you are the only one who will argue with him.’21
According to Julie Andrews the regime at the school was pretty rigorous, with ‘academic lessons in the morning and ballet, tap and character dancing in the afternoons’.22 Beryl’s view was the opposite: ‘I’m at this new school,’ she wrote to a friend, Billy Cousins, whom she’d met in Scotland the previous year, ‘where we just dance or act or paint or do music, no school work whatever.’23
Ian suspected, not without some justification, that this was more a case of lack of application than lack of schoolwork: ‘You don’t strike me as working hard enough since you seem to be writing a lot of letters instead of working, and most of those seem to be done in class or prep.’24 He pointed out the difference between their two approaches, though he hardly made his own sound appealing: ‘You don’t start work till the afternoon and you’re finished by 8.30. By that time I’m only just about half-way through my work. I start at 10 in the morning and work until 11 at night. 13 hours a day.’25
No doubt the school expected pupils of Beryl’s age to work by themselves in prep and study periods, which Beryl seems to have considered simply as free time. But it’s also true that the emphasis at Tring was more on turning out quality dancers than academics – the school’s founders ‘shared one ultimate goal: to produce prima ballerinas’.26 Even so, the educational part of the curriculum was taken seriously enough to the extent that Beryl’s teachers had begun talking about exams. This immediately prompted sarcastic comments from Ian:
Also emerging from odds and ends at dinner is a strange rumour concerning you. It relates that your oberlieutenants intend to put you in for your School Cert this next July (Prolonged Roars of Laughter). Some hopes. Your commanding officers must be either escaped lunatics or communists. Anyway they haven’t the foggiest notion of what they’re doing. As a sort of proof of their madness I quote from your last letter: ‘. . . and the term lasts 10 weeks, or 70 days, or 4,820 hours, or something near there.’ There is not the faintest resemblance between your reckoning and the correct answer. In 70 days there are only 1,680 hours, that’s more than 3,000 difference.27
A similarly incredulous tone was adopted by a former Merchant Taylors’ schoolfriend, Annette Moore, which shows the lack of esteem in which Beryl’s academic standing was held among her peers: ‘I think its a hell of a lark! you taking School Cert in July!!! how funny – just how do you think your going to do it???? I hope you dont take Geography!! and MATHS!!! O Dear I’d love to see your face when you see the exam papers!!’28
It was perhaps inevitable that the pattern enacted at Merchant Taylors’ would repeat itself at Tring: Beryl excelled in drama (‘Well done, little girl,’ Winnie wrote encouragingly. ‘We are proud of you being top and I was very thrilled with the remarks passed by your drama mistress . . .’),29 but her inability to concentrate on other subjects led to conflicts and a general disengagement with school life.
Unsurprisingly, her exams didn’t go well. Ian went through her finished papers shortly afterwards to work out whether she’d passed and his conclusions weren’t encouraging: ‘I don’t say anything about Biology, but you seem to have answered confidently, if not competently. I wish you success . . . Your French paper you can class as a complete failure. I’ve never seen such rot. “I was reading” you put as “Je etait lire” i.e. no accent on the “e”, wrong time, completely senseless.’30
But the end of the exams meant Beryl was free to go back to Formby, back to her walks in the pine woods, and to her meetings with Lyn, who was counting the days till she saw her ‘lickle girl’ again: ‘Come round on the 22nd of course you adorable stupe,’ Lyn wrote excitedly. ‘Don’t oversleep kid or I’ll brain you. I’m looking forward to seeing your teeth and everything (not forgetting your Adam’s apple) so much I can hardly wait . . .’31
The seashore and pine woods at Formby were where Beryl could feel free and escape the emotionally cramped confines of Goodacre. She was more than a little concerned, therefore, when she read in the Formby Times that the council might approve plans for a bus service to the shore. In the event, the siting of a bus terminal proved too difficult and the idea was shelved. The matter might have rested there, but in the ‘Formby Forum’ section of the newspaper Beryl read a letter with the mawkish heading ‘Beach Trek is Too Far For Tiny Feet’, which registered a ‘strong protest’ against the council for postponing the bus service, complaining that ‘countless families are prevented from using our own foreshore’ and ‘innumerable happy hours of sunshine, sand-play and sea-bathing are lost to young children just because the journey to and from the shore is too long for little feet’.32 The letter’s sanctimonious attempt to paint children as helpless victims was too much for Beryl. She took up her pen to defend her little patch of freedom and the result was her first piece of published writing:
Sir – I should like to reply to the letter in Formby Forum (5th March) regarding the bus service to the shore to save those tired feet. This would involve the removal of overhanging branches to ensure complete safety and comply with the transport regulations.
Ever since I could walk I can remember tramping down to the shore and sprawling in the sand at the side of the road, and eating the blackberries that grow on the lane to the sea.
Every summer one sees groups of children of all ages, with their dogs, rambling along with their jam jars over their shoulders, to the tadpole pools.
A bus service would cause inconvenience to the scores of cyclists and numerous dogs and children who like to go by other means than motor transport. Besides, the shore is always, and always has been all the year round, more than empty of Formby folk, who seemingly have no interest in the sea or are too lazy.
Buses would be an abomination. They are utterly modern and completely out of keeping with the beauty of the shore.
Those who care sufficiently about the sea always will walk, and enjoy it into the bargain. I appeal to the citizens of Formby not to ask for buses to run them down. The quietness and tranquillity of Formby foreshore must not be disturbed.
BB, Ravenmeols Lane, Formby.33
The letter has all the hallmarks of Beryl’s later writing on social issues, with its tirade against modernity and change, and its contempt for those who wanted everything to be made easier for them. The following week, Winnie gleefully wrote that her letter had prompted no fewer than two replies. One of the correspondents picked up on the logical weakness of Beryl’s argument – her statement that the shore was empty of Formby folk ‘all the year round’ was more a point against her position than for it – and went on to describe her as ‘a little behind the times’ and her stance as ‘a little unreal’.34 It wouldn’t be the last time such accusations were levelled at Beryl’s public pronouncements.
Although technically Beryl had another year of school, by the time she returned to Tring in the autumn of 1948 even her parents considered there was little point.35 Beryl was never going to catch up academically, and her focus was almost entirely on a future working in the theatre. At Christmas, Richard agreed that if she were to find a suitable job she could leave school in the spring.
Back at Tring, it didn’t take long for the tedium to set back in: ‘God I
hate this crowd of louses,’36 she noted, barely three weeks into the New Year. A month later she was even more blunt: ‘I hate everybody here. They neither understand or like me . . . Ah! Bleeding fools.’37 She was fed up with being treated like a child and, like many rebellious teenagers, had begun to adopt the outward signifiers of adulthood: smoking and drinking. ‘I’m longing for a ciggarette,’ she wrote in her diary shortly after her return, ‘I am bad tempered. I need a still whiskey.’38 Despite this, there were a few moments of respite – fencing lessons with a male master, Jamie Milligan, was a particular highlight: ‘He really is rather sweet, noone likes him (so they pretend) but I do. His bottom is so energetic.’39
Nevertheless, the thought that ‘this is going to be my last term’40 cheered her up, as did her loss in weight (‘I’m thinner, must stay that way too’). On her half-term break there was more good news. Utilizing some of his old business contacts, Richard arranged a meeting with Robert Hall, a Liverpool councillor and former lord mayor who had connections to the Playhouse. As a regular theatregoer Beryl would have known of Maud Carpenter, the Playhouse’s general manager, by reputation if not in person, and she had been to the Playhouse so many times she was on speaking terms with those who worked there, including Fred Kearney who handled the theatre’s publicity. But there was nothing like an official recommendation to open the right doors, as Beryl noted in her diary: ‘Went with Daddy to see R. J. Hall. Ex Lord Mayor of Liverpool. He gave me a letter of intro to Maud Carpenter. She was so terribly sweet. Fred did look surprised.’41
