A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  Very moving. I don’t quite know why I had not given the entire plot away from the start for I fixed my eyes in a steady glazed stare at a point somewhere beyond Ashdown Forest and never let it waver. It went on at the Village Hall and was well received by a rather sparse audience who had other things on their minds since, a day or so before, Germany had annexed Austria. This irritated me more than anything else. We had a poor house, and I felt that the Message of the play was unfairly judged. However I cheered up considerably when I realised that within a few days I should be seventeen and Mr Cox had offered me my first leading role in a “real” play which was to be the September Event of the Village.

  It was decided by the all male Committee of the Newick Amateur Dramatic Society, known as the NADS, to do an all male play With A Warning. “Journey’s End” was selected as being the most suitable—a reasonable cast, one set, and timely in a year of mounting tensions. I was to play Raleigh. I started to learn the French’s acting edition there and then.

  In the meantime the rest of life was going on in its implacable way, which in no way affected me much until the death of beloved Mrs Jane and shortly afterwards that of Grandfather Aimé. A slight stroke and growing incontinence finally forced his departure from the grubby house by the West Pier into his clean, spartan, nursing home in Kemp Town.

  Enraged at being removed forcefully, as he said, he gave one of his cronies in the Junk Trade a five pound note to strip out the house. My parents arrived to collect him one morning as two packed vans drove away from the mouldy square. He retained a few “Treasures” with which to furnish his room at Kemp Town; the rest were dispersed all over Sussex, some even landing up at Christie’s months later. There was nothing to be done, everything was perfectly legal, and my distressed parents managed only to retrieve a Nanking jar, a black ebony table, and a pile of National Geographical Magazines. Grandpapa’s spite had won. And it finally killed him off, loathing his Matron, smoking like a chimney, and wilfully peeing all over his faded Aubusson. He went almost as suddenly as he had entered, or re-entered, our lives. Singularly unmissed and shortly forgotten.

  Rehearsals for “Journey’s End” started amidst the growing tension in Europe. Not, perhaps, the wisest of plays to attempt on the threshold of a new war—although that did seem rather unlikely to me once I had been reassured, by gentle Nerine, that I would not be called up until I was at least nineteen, which gave me two years, and no war, no modern war that is to say, could possibly last that long. Also, she had heard it said at the Red Cross and in the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, to which she was devoting more and more of her time, that all the German Tanks were made of cardboard and the Population were half starving, having neither milk nor meat nor butter.

  My father, needless to say, did not share these opinions and was longer and longer at “The Times” than he was at home. All about us a disturbing feeling of apprehension was stirring. People were getting restless and even starting to dig trenches in the London parks. Erica Schwartz and her friends got more and more frantic and held long urgent meetings in the Common Room and begged us all to be Conscientious Objectors, which I thought might be quite a good idea the way things were moving. One of my special new girl friends, a golden blonde with a white sports car and a father who made shoes in Czechoslovakia, one day was no longer at Class and we heard that she had suddenly been ordered back to Prague. I was very depressed because she was beautiful, rich, clever and liked me to the extent of cooking me baked beans on toast on her gas ring in a crumby little flat which she rented for fun in Jubilee Place. I was astonished that she should leave without even sending me a note for we had become, I thought, very Close Friends… however, she went. The Govonis had been recalled to Rome some time before, but Giovanna was sent back to stay with us for a holiday to “keep up her English”. The telephone now rang almost constantly from Rome with worried appeals to get her back as soon as possible. My father and I drove her down to a boat at Newhaven and shoved her up the bursting gangway filled with anxious people carrying bags and suitcases. We waited on the quay until eventually a small, weeping red-headed figure fought her way to the stern waving, sobbing and crying out “I love you. I’ll never forget you. Goodbye, Goodbye.” The sirens went, gulls screeched and the packed ship moved gently away from us.

  She stood there waving and waving until the ship made a slow turn to port at the end of the long jetty and bore her away, out of my sight, for twenty-three years.

  My father and I were very quiet driving home through the lanes to the house. He only spoke once, when we stopped at the Chalk Pit outside Lewes for a beer.

  “I can’t really believe,” he said, “that it is all going to happen again.”

  The rehearsals for the NADS were cancelled. No one seemed to have the heart to read through a play which was regrettably becoming more and more timely. Added to which it was difficult to get the cast together because people suddenly had extra things to do in their spare time, and Cissie Waghorn, who had a car, dragooned and bullied myself and a boy from Fairwarp called Buster into driving about the county fitting elderly people with gas masks and explaining to them the problems of Blast and Blackouts.

  Influenced by all this activity and talk of a new War, and very much by “Journey’s End”, I started to paint, exhaustingly, scenes from the first World War. I read every book I could lay my hands on in my father’s study ranging from All Quiet On The Western Front, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The War Of The Guns to the Michelin Guides to the Battlefields. William Orpen, John and Paul Nash became my idols, and my bedroom was covered with reproductions of their works. I was quite convinced that I was painting in this fury because I was the reincarnation of a young soldier who had been killed in 1917. Nothing would budge me from the belief; the output of my work was prodigious, leading Sutherland to say that it was probably better to “get it out of my system” and exercise my imagination. He was very patient and understanding and knew full well that no reincarnation was taking place, simply a release from too much emotionalism.

  In this welter of second hand grief, anxiety, and something which was rapidly approaching self-pity, the Polytechnic closed down for the Summer Recess and, armed with my paints and brushes plus a bursting portfolio of agonizing scenes in the blazing ruins of Ypres, Albert with its leaning Virgin and sundry portions of the entire Western Front, I glumly headed for Sussex, Nerine and the fitting of yet more gas masks. I felt lost, worried and disconnected. Even though my last reports from the Art School had been glowing and highly encouraging, I felt within me the interest and love for Art slowly ebbing. I knew, instinctively, that I would never be a successful painter, for the simple reason that I did not want to be. I had no dedication but a totally God-given talent which I truthfully wished could be directed towards the main love of my life: the Theatre. And my father’s sudden and extraordinary decision, already planned long before I knew anything about it, to send me off to study the process of colour photogravure at The Sun Engraving Co Ltd at Watford came like a bolt from the proverbial blue and only increased my growing despair. If I had given up the idea of the career laid down for me it was quite clear that his mind was still quietly working towards Printing House Square.

  Accordingly, one hot July morning, I presented myself at the Works in Whippendall Road, was warmly welcomed, and bustled into “digs” in an ugly terrace house in a long red brick street half a mile away. My landlady, a widow with tight yellow curls and a diamond brooch in her orange cardigan, showed me my room at the top of the stairs, hoped that I’d be “comfy” and said that all meals would be taken in the front parlour with herself and her son, who was a coffin polisher. Tea, she said, would be very soon and she would hit the gong when it was ready. My room, floored with dead brown linoleum, had a wide double bed, a washbowl with jug and a florid brass clock on the mantel which played eight bars of “The Sunshine Of Your Smile” at the hours and, like Bishopbriggs, struck all the quarters.

  I learned absolutely nothing during my stay i
n the Sun Engraving Works. Not for want of teaching; people were wonderfully good and did everything they could to make me comprehend and enjoy the “job” which I was to follow through. Colour printing was still fairly new at that time and it was my father’s greatest ambition, one day, to see the picture page of The Times in glowing colour. It was, apart from Northcliffe and all the Astors and their Newspaper, his consuming passion. As a very small child I remember, in the studio in St George’s Road, my mother standing about swathed in bolts of coloured silks while my father and Logie Baird photographed her from different rooms, I presume, with an early Television Camera. It was all very home-made and it is all rather vague in my memory. However, it was a passion which filtered into the house and into all of us, and I clearly recall the pride and excitement of seeing the first colour photograph ever taken by ordinary stage lighting in a Theatre. It was a glass plate of Pavlova dancing “The Dying Swan” and she received it, apparently with gratitude and delight, according to her letter; that small rectangle of softly coloured glass (the second one) remained my father’s most treasured possession, for it represented the culmination of years of experiment, bullying, cajoling and stubborn insistence for which he was entirely responsible.

  But the love was not being transmitted to the son. Although I followed every single process from re-touching to the stapling and final folding of one wretched magazine as it came thudding off the machines, absolutely nothing whatsoever went in to my bewildered brain. I returned to the family home a little thinner, more determined than ever to try and avoid anything whatsoever to do with newspapers, and the cheerful owner of two blue budgerigars which someone in the Print Shop, who bred them, had given me. They had been in the house three days when Minnehaha, the cat, ate them: and vanished as swiftly as my father’s hopes of his vision of my future.

  A few nights later we drove down to Croydon Airport to meet one of his photographers who was, he hoped, on the last flight out of Prague. Standing in the dark waiting for the plane to come in he suddenly said: “I suppose really that this is a very demanding profession. I think one really has to want to do it very much to make it work … I love it so much, as you know, that I wanted you to share it with me. But it is no good forcing you: I can see that it’s got to be something which is in you, and it is clearly not in you. Never mind.” And that was all he ever said. A little later the plane arrived, a long lumbering corrugated iron cigar with wings. His photographer came down the gangway, tie-less, dishevelled, clutching a small case and his camera. He was very distressed.

  Driving through Streatham he suddenly said: “Christ! Oh Christ! They pulled this woman off and shoved me on. It was the last plane you see. She kept screaming and crying. I held the door against her, they were all battering at the side of the damned thing, crying, begging. I’ll never forget her, I’ll never forget her.”

  A profession, I thought miserably, that you really have to want to do to “make it work”.

  It all stopped with Mr Chamberlain’s piece of white paper, blowing in the wind, and “Peace In Our Time”. Joy and relief were so gigantic that no one seemed to stop for a second to consider whose time he meant, his, or ours. But it was enough.

  Back went the rehearsals of “Journey’s End” now even more potent with message. It was a tremendous success. The Hall was packed for three nights solid, and people came from as far afield as Lewes and Haywards Heath. The emotion among our audiences was tangible. My set (I had been allowed to design it) was highly accurate after my “studies” and my own performance was warmly received. Raleigh is a cinch anyway, but I didn’t know that then.

  My wretched father, who detested anything which remotely reminded him of his own brutal war, was eventually dragged to see me on the final Saturday night. Sitting with my proud mother he was, he later said, very moved. Not unnaturally. But he still was not about to weaken completely on his decision about my career. An actor’s life was still not discussed.

  “Was I really all right?” I asked my mother.

  “Yes really, you were very good indeed. I was proud.”

  “But when I hit that damned plate on the table and it flew into the audience …”

  “That was when I knew you could be an actor, darling, you let it go as if you had meant it to go. No one moved in the audience, you know, no one at all. You had controlled the move and made them feel that it was true, and not a mistake.”

  “It really was all right?”

  “That’s what acting is all about,” said my mother. “Convince yourself and convince them. Never one without the other.” She was not entirely accurate, but near enough. And without quite knowing it. “Always Applauded” was stirring it up with a vengeance.

  In October 1938 Elissa Thorburn, an elderly lady of moderate means, built and opened a theatre in a buttercup field just behind the Station and next to the Coach Terminus, at Uckfield. I had noticed, riding about the area with Nerine, the red brick form take place, but had quite thought it was to be a new factory or a building for the Public Works. It was, however, to be “the most modern, comfortable, best designed theatre in Sussex”. Miss Thorburn had bullied and cajoled money from various sources, mostly her own, and the theatre opened with a shrill of local publicity and a performance of “Noah”, by Andre Obey. And she used real actors from London, not us amateurs. Except that we were asked to come along and help out by playing Crowd or small parts for which she did not pay. The First Night was splendid with the Reigning Families and anyone else who could afford the not excessively cheap price of the seats.

  Unhappily Miss Thorburn had already started to alienate the Local Council by refusing to put on plays which she considered suitable only for the, what she called, Hoi Poloi… that is to say, no “Rookery Nook”, no “Charley’s Aunt”. It was to be “The Dramatic Glyndebourne,” she said. And made a slight error here to start with. Never alienate your Local Councillors who consider that they are not Hoi Poloi but like a good “Rookery Nook”; and don’t choose a small market town which never even went to the local cinema except on wet Saturdays and then only if “Tarzan” was running or the Home Team was playing Worthing at Bolton. The local councillors were bewildered by “Noah”, insulted by the unhappy phrase “Hoi Poloi” and hated the cold, brick, functional theatre behind the Railway Station. Theatres, they reckoned, for the money that they had all contributed, should be gold and red and filled with a “good bit of family entertainment.”

  Not for them translations from the French about a Biblical figure, set in a cold warehouse. And having to wear a black tie as well in the weekday evenings was asking a bit too much all round. However they did notice that there was no central aisle, and therefore there could be an infringement of the Safety Regulations. But that point came a little later. For the moment only the anger mounted. One day, passing the theatre in as casual a way as I could manage, I found the doors open and wandered into the cool, dark, auditorium.

  One working light gleamed on the stage. A tall, tweedy, woman was painting, not very well, a canvas flat. Seeing me standing among her brand new seats, only one play old, she straightened up, waving a paint-brush in my direction and told me to be off.

  “Shoo!” she cried. “Shoo!” Her hair had fallen round her face like straw; she was hot and cross. I stood. “What do you want with me? Be off, boy!” Her anger was clear.

  “I want a job,” I said.

  “What kind of a job …?”

  “paint scenery. I’m an artist.”

  “I don’t need a scenic designer … Are you strong?”

  I said I was and she told me to come across the seats and on to the stage and together we manhandled a large Austrian stove into a corner. I stayed the rest of the day there, painted a number of flats, screwed the handles on to a chest of drawers and accepted her grudging offer of a shilling an hour when I worked.

  Over the next few months, in all my spare time and every weekend, I went to the Uckfield Theatre and worked with Miss Thorburn to get the place ready for the Spring P
erformance. It transpired that she had seen me in “Journey’s End”, having used as many of the NADS as she could, to save money and “to give them valuable experience” in the production of “Noah”. Covered as they had been in furs and masks I had not recognised any of them, but that was not of importance. They were, I reckoned, amateurs whereas I already earned my way and was doing it as a dedication. The new production was to be “Glorious Morning”, a heavy play about a Democracy being invaded by a Fascist State. It didn’t bother me one way or the other until, with one bright eye on expenses, she offered me a part and said that she would pay me five shillings a performance. The fact that I was twenty years too young for the role didn’t worry either of us; however I did agree that a black leather coat, a hat and a heavy moustache, would assist me in my “performance”. We finished off the sets, rigged all the lighting together, and by the time the Real Actors arrived from London, at the end of April, we were ready to go. Except for the rehearsals which she, as director and producer, and soleowner of her Dream, would conduct personally.