by Ngaio Marsh
At 11.30 a.m. on the fourteenth day the last bale went ashore and the passengers were given final instructions. We were to assemble in the tiny smoking room and remain there until further orders. One heavily armed soldier stood inside the door and another on the deck outside. Time dragged and we got hungrier and hungrier. Professor S. and another passenger sang Gilbert and Sullivan very slowly and lugubriously and we all joined in the chorus. The guard, not without reason, slightly smiled. After about an hour and a half, Professor S. muttered under his breath and went out on deck. He was at once ordered by gesture and ejaculation to return. Some time after two o’clock, an officer and private soldier arrived. The officer put our passports on one of the tables. We all confessed afterwards to a sensation of extravagant relief at the sight of the passports. This reaction told us just how apprehensive we had been. But the passports were not returned to us. Instead, the officer opened each one and made a long staring comparison between the hideous photograph and the original. He then handed them over to his subordinate together with a flat black object which I felt sure was a camera and which was quickly pocketed. They left us. We endured another long interval during which Mr Thompson, the Dane, and Professor S. lost their tempers and were damped down by their wives. We found out afterwards that during these interminable hours, the ship was subjected to an exhaustive search. At three o’clock the guards went away and the loudspeaker said we were free. When we got down to the main deck the mooring ropes were being cast off and the engines were throbbing.
And now, as a gap of dark water widened between the Temeraire and the Odessa wharf, people down below, for the first time looked up at us. They smiled and waved and we waved back; almost, it seemed for a minute or two, as if there were two groups of human beings wanting, before they lost sight of each other for ever, to come to some sort of understanding.
‘Poor devils!’ one of the passengers said.
But they didn’t seem to me to be unhappy. They were shabby, hard-working and without any conspicuous vivacity. Beyond that I, for one, received no more positive impression unless it was of a sort of plodding acquiescence.
They waved for a little while and then turned back to their work.
Our next port of call, it was announced, would be Torreslavega on the east coast of Spain.
IV
The contrast could scarcely have been greater. From the bay, a few rows of little pinkish-pale houses stared at us. They had black window-holes in their faces and might have been painted on their bleached, salty background by Christopher Wood. We were halfway between Alicante and Cartagena in a little bay too shallow to allow an ocean-going vessel as modest, even, as the Temeraire, to come alongside the wharf. We anchored offshore.
Here was the other kind of totalitarianism: Catholic, picturesque, inconsistent, savage no doubt and, in the background, infamous, but on the face of it good-tempered and a bit ridiculous. The officials who boarded us in Torreslavega were armed to the teeth like bandits and rich in documents, but somehow it all boiled down to them joyously wolfing up any cigarettes that were offered them and suddenly waiving all formalities. All but one. They objected to Professor S.’s very conservative, waist-to-knee, old gentleman’s shorts. ‘I go ashore in no other apparel,’ he said hotly. ‘The thing is ridiculous.’ The officials retired to the customs shed and after a longish interval, reappeared beaming, with a special permit that said El Professor S. would be permitted to enter Spain ‘wearing his pantaloons’.
We were rowed to and from the ship by fisherboys of about twelve years old, who preferred cigarettes to pesetas. They sang, all the way: short songs of a kind that suited the warm weather and the dip of their oars – could they have been made up of the verses that are called coplas? The boys constituted themselves our escort and swaggered along beside us ordering off any lesser urchins who attempted to tag along and beg. They were tough, proud boys. We noticed that our particular one – was he José or Pedro or Carlos? – grew drowsy if we stayed ashore latish in the evening. Once, at about nine o’clock, while we had a drink in a sort of vague restaurant that was called a club he waited as usual, outside, but catching our attention through the window, laid his folded hands along his cheek, shut his eyes, inclined his head and by dint of mime, conveyed to us that he had been out all the previous night with his father’s fishing boat. He had become, suddenly, a sleepy child and we were filled with remorse.
We were loading salt in Torreslavega. It was rowed out in dinghies, hauled up in buckets and tipped into the holds. This process allowed plenty of time for visits to Alicante and Cartagena. To this end some of us hired a car with a single-fanged driver who smelt more violently of garlic than one would have supposed humanly possible. He was incandescent with garlic. On the disgraceful road to Cartagena I sat in front and had the dubious good fortune to meet with his approval. Somehow or another, as we bounced and lurched over potholes we managed to conduct a basic kind of conversation, mostly by means of gesture for which he removed both hands from the wheel. Whenever I guessed his meaning he roared with laughter, dazing me with great hot gusts of garlic, pointing to himself and then to me and crossed his middle finger over the index one. Then, to indicate how well we understood one another, he hit me smartly on the suspender knob. It was a painful trip.
When we arrived in Cartagena he drove us into the slums and introduced us to his family, who were charming.
We lunched very late in a working-man’s restaurant where the food was good and the patron obliging. In paying him we found an English sixpence among my pesetas. He turned it over, pointed to the sovereign’s head, sighed like a furnace and shook his head. So vivid is Spanish gesture that it seems in retrospect that he must have spoken the phrases that he mimed: ‘Ah, Señora, you are fortunate. Ourselves…alas!’ As we left he laid his finger to his lips and drew aside an old coat that hung from a nail on the door. There were exposed two very faded photographs, one of the Queen and the other of the Pretender to the Spanish throne. It would have been nice if we could have brought him together with our Captain.
After a steady rumour that we would all be landed at Copenhagen, the Temeraire discharged her passengers at a small port in Wales. Bob (my old comrade of Commonwealth Theatre Company days) had found out about our arrival and telegraphed that he would drive nobly across England and into Wales to meet us.
All the other passengers had gone. Essie and I said goodbye to the Captain and the officers, sat on the hatch and told each other what a pleasant voyage it had been and how we would always remember the Temeraire with affection. It was quite late in the afternoon when the car arrived. We turned back to look at our little ship: elegantly graceful and unpretentious. As one does on such occasions, I promised myself another voyage in her some day.
V
There have been other voyages but not in the Temeraire: voyages to the Far East, to the USA and to Greece. Happy voyages in ships with a limited number of passengers and smart voyages in grand liners. There have been luxurious trains like the one from Kyoto to Tokyo and shabby comfortable trains like the old grande dame sweeping across the USA from San Francisco to Chicago, and innumerable joggings by branch lines in England. Flanders and Swan were here the other day and with their little dirge for fallen trains did awful things to addicts. Has Dr Beeching or his successor slaughtered that most amiable of branch lines: the one that potters to and fro between Leamington and Stratford-upon-Avon by way of Warwick? What are they going to buy with all the money they make from the killing-off of little trains?
The year 1955 was spent mostly in London where I took a minute and beguiling house in Hans Road. The two young New Zealand cousins were now commissioned in the Gunners and in the RAF respectively and, as we had so often planned, they spent their leaves with me. They were wonderfully gay company; everything entertained and delighted them. I used to see people in theatres and restaurants smile when they looked at them or overheard what they said: I suppose because they were so very un-blasé and so obviously enjoying themselves
.
With The Gunner, I took what is perhaps the most spellbinding train of all, the Night Ferry to Paris: the train that is already French when you step into it at Victoria, that magnificently pours itself at speed through the night to the coast, stops and goes quiet. If you are still awake in your bunk you hear brief metallic sounds and then feel a lift and a suspended swaying. When you look out of your window the end of a jetty slides past and then – how strangely – a word with an arrow: ‘To Dunkirk’. The Gunner was greatly excited. He stayed up until we were seaborne and called me repeatedly through the communicating door looking for all his six-foot-two, very much as he did when he first came down to school in Christchurch.
This was the year of Laurence Olivier’s Macbeth at Stratford-upon-Avon. Bob and another friend and I drove back the hundred miles to London after the show and were so rapt, so involved by this extraordinary performance that the hours slipped by like a dream. The eldest of the Lamprey children, now a mama, and I stayed in Stratford for a week and I returned yet again by myself. I had become an habituée.
I don’t really mind the ‘Bard Industry’ aspect of Stratford and what’s more I don’t think the Bard would have minded it either. It’s better that there should be an olde radio shoppe, one or two souvenir absurdities and a display of handweavery that might well have been created for Miss Margaret Rutherford in character, than that the place should be put into a sort of sacred aspic and (like a perennial galantine in a passenger ship) taken in and out of the deep freeze and never marred by cutting. It is, I feel, not inappropriate that lorries and charabancs rumble over Clopton Bridge and along the London Road. One regrets, of course, that the theatre should have been built at exactly the wrong moment in the development of modern architecture. There may be something pretty silly about a modern hotel calling its guest rooms after Shakespeare’s characters. (It would be fun to write for reservations stipulating: ‘Either Doll Tearsheet or Pompey Bum, if you please.’) But what may we not set beside these maggots? Captain Jaggard’s bookshop. A walk at dawn or dusk across the fields to Charlecote. Groups of Warwickshire oaks that are also, and so clearly, ‘a wood near Athens’, a hilltop where poor Wat might have sat on his hinder legs listening, dew-bedabbled wretch, for the cry of the hounds. The Falcon Inn, which carries its age with grace and no gimmicks. A quiet church with a monstrous effigy to which you need pay no attention. And nightly, from early spring to late autumn, the sounding out before unfashionable cosmopolitan audiences of a music in words. This music so easily, so good-humouredly transcends all other spoken English in our history, that it raises a kind of laugh in the throat and heart whenever one hears it.
Of all the oddly divergent people, ideas and things that have attracted my devotion, I find most reason in my attachment to these plays. After writing this down it has just occurred to me for the first time, that if I had not directed ten of Shakespeare’s plays I would have written ten more detective stories and been, I daresay, ten times better off.
How right I was!
VI
When I first applied myself to writing this book, it seemed to me that I would be obliged to make a sort of practical equivalent of that familiar experience which I have tried to describe in the first chapter. I thought that I must look on at myself: slide apart from my own image as if I were mis-focusing a camera upon it. And just as when the strange sensation of duality visits me, I always, by an involuntary act of defensiveness, return to my everyday self: so, I find, have I withdrawn from writing about experiences which have most closely concerned and disturbed me. What I have written turns out to be a straying recollection of places and people: I have been deflected by my own reticence.
It is with people that I would like to end this chapter: with some of the people who have formed its design. If, indeed, it may be said to have a design.
I look out of my windows, across the plains and there are the Alps. It is easy to find the shadowed valley where we camped and, further south, the entry into the Waimakariri Gorge leading to the high country, Arthur’s Pass, the Main Range and Westland. The house is warm with recollections of Unk, Papa Jellett, Mivvie, Colin, Cecil and dear James: all of them very cheerful. But it is not just a house of recollections. There are at present, family visitors of three generations and many others going back as far as St Margaret’s and even Tib’s and there is a steady flow of past and present student-players. I am fortunate in my house and the people who come to it.
Three years ago, after two months of complicated and exciting voyages to Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the USA, ending with an unpleasant Atlantic crossing in a German liner, I landed at Southampton. With what seemed to me to be quite bewildering friendliness, I was given a telegram and shepherded into a train by two of the port officials. Green downs and spinneys fled past the windows and in a clearing in a wood there were English countrymen, doing something leisurely with a cart and horse. I visited an unsmart bar in the train called, absurdly, a tavern. The pallid barman and tepid drink might have been Ganymede and Ambrosia. When the ugly backsides of Outer London’s railroad houses began to close in, peculiar things happened in my throat, and when the Battersea Power Station, that unlovely inverted udder, loomed murkily forward, I actually cried with happiness and the sensation of Home. Is this sentimental? Very well, then, it is sentimental.
So, once more I was in London. In a little house in Montpelier Walk. Here it is, on the sunny side of the street, looking towards the dome of the Oratory and with the Prince of Wales, a decorous pub, in the foreground. I am visited once a week by a hoarse flower-seller (’Anytime. All fresh.’), by a whistling piano-accordionist who is rumoured to trade in filthy postcards on the side and by cheerful French onion-sellers. Jonathan Elsom, one of my student-players, on bursary at a drama school, is staying with me. My London secretary, who is also a friend of earlier days in New Zealand, is typing out a dramatization of False Scent which Jemima, the eldest Lamprey daughter, and I, have sweated out between us. (This play will, in the near future, be sold to a London management. Three years will go by. Jemima and I, by a kind of mental osmosis, will gradually absorb the truth about selling plays. We will discover that whatever may be said to suggest more precipitant action, the play may well be put into cold storage, occasionally taken out and blown upon and then put back again. At the moment, however, we are all wide-eyed enthusiasm.)
I await a visitor. Presently he arrives. Over six feet tall. Very erect. Very alert. The familiar Micawber-like voice and the stately periods roll round our little drawing room. He has been in retirement for many years but, as if the ‘stroller’s’ drops of blood in his veins infect all the rest, he still travels a great deal. He visits his son and his old theatre associates in Australia, taking a devious course on the way.
‘I had meningitis in Madrid,’ he proclaims. ‘A great bore, it was, but it has left no serious defects that I am aware of.’
‘Four score and three,’ he says. ‘But not, I hope, greatly inconvenienced by the weight of years.’
Not greatly. Scarcely at all. Indeed, the years themselves disintegrate like mist and there he is asking me how I would like to be an actress or booming awfully with a coffin-plate crown upon his head, giving what-for to the witches.
The telephone rings. A falsetto voice tells me that the private secretary to Mr Chou En-Lai wishes to speak to me. I wait in a state of unsuspended disbelief until a second voice, speaking pidgin-English, says that Mr Chou will meet me in a certain little opium den under the American Embassy at thirteen hours GMT. I am to have a camellia clenched between my teeth and a copy of The War Cry in my left boot.
‘And, darling,’ says the voice, ‘such a crisis blowing up! You can’t think.’
Jonathan is coming to dinner. We will speak for a little while of old times, but will soon turn to the present and Jon’s future and what we are all going to do next.
CHAPTER 12
Second Wind
Perhaps I should have started with a heading Twenty Years After, wh
ich sounds like the title of a Victorian novel. Indeed I believe there was such a one and that it dealt with convicts in Australia.
It is in fact getting on for twenty years since I wrote the final paragraphs of the preceding chapter and almost as long ago since I last read them. The middle-aged woman is now very old. Her lines of perspective stretch out behind her and the beech tree is almost out of sight.
When we are young, old age is something that happens to other people. This attitude persisted in my father until he was well into his seventies. He once said to me that he always thought of himself as a young man and added in his surprised voice that he supposed that was absurd. I don’t think he really believed it to be so or, if he did, gave a damn one way or the other. He preferred the company of my contemporaries. When his own – Unk or dear James, for instance – had reminisced at some length about the friends and events of their past my father would afterwards say fretfully that he found it all rather boring.
I resented the approach of middle age whenever I reflected that it had already overtaken me, but was almost too busy for this consideration to occur. Old age has caught me completely by surprise. It was the sudden onset of uncertain health that did the trick and the realization that the activity one most valued and passionately enjoyed was no longer possible. It must be packed up and put away with theatrical photographs and old programmes: a tidying-up process before a journey on which one will be obliged to travel very light indeed.
