by Peter Rankin
After I’d summarised the letters and given the result to Joan, she finished the first draft which ended in 1955, before the time of the plays that had made Theatre Workshop world famous. Puzzling over this, I posted it to an expectant publisher. A few days later he rang.
‘But there’s no Taste of Honey, no Hostage. I mean, come on, where’s Oh What a Lovely War? Is Joan mad?’
The conversation ended pretty quickly after that. I put the receiver down and relayed the publisher’s question to Joan. Her answer was equally impatient.
‘Theatre Workshop was not just about doing plays. It was a design for living.’
Impatience always seized her when someone asked questions about Theatre Workshop. Explanations bored her. At rehearsals, she conveyed ideas through excitement. A to B to C? Forget it. She didn’t stop there.
‘Harry Corbett and George Cooper leaving the company was the end of Theatre Workshop.’
‘So Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney and – ’
‘Writing jobs. I was working night and day to make a script. There was no time for anything else.’
Evidently ‘anything else’ contained the design for living. What was it, I wondered. However, Joan hadn’t finished.
‘Tyrone Guthrie was good but he didn’t try to change the world. We did.’
Oh, Joan was referring to another director, something she rarely did, at least not politely. When she was young, Tyrone Guthrie was the best director in the UK and, if Gerry was right, the only one because he had told me Guthrie and Joan were the only directors this country had produced. So, good as he was, Guthrie hadn’t changed the world. That, at least, provided a clue.
A few days later, Howard Goorney, a founder member of Theatre Workshop, rang from Bath to ask if he could drop round for tea after an Equity meeting in London. I repeated Joan’s remarks about Harry Corbett and George Cooper, her two leading actors.
‘Did she really say that?’ asked Howard.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m glad. That’s what I think.’
‘Oh,’ was all I could think.
My problem was Gerry Raffles. Where did that leave him? Gerry was proud of those shows. Had they not made Theatre Workshop world famous and, from his teens, had that not been his ambition? He especially loved Oh What a Lovely War. Almost hugging himself, he used to say: ‘It’s a little classic and it’s going to go on and on.’ Joan dismissing that and the other shows was breathtaking. If only I could have heard Gerry’s reaction; but he’d been dead seventeen years.
What about this design for living then? It sounded rather grand, and grand can be irritating. It was better not to ask Joan more questions, though. An argument would have followed and, as usual, I would have come off worst. It was not only Muhammad Ali who could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Still, I remembered that, if you took the trouble, you could look beyond Joan’s grand words and find something practical.
Certainly, if I wanted to understand Joan and Gerry, using what I had learned from them, to find out about the sinews, the stresses and strains, the who-did-what that made Theatre Workshop into the company that broke more ground than any other in Britain during the twentieth century but left Joan wanting more, it looked as if I would have to follow the two aims: Joan’s design for living and Gerry’s Theatre Workshop.
Joan’s odd behaviour following Gerry’s death in 1975 meant, to be more precise, that she behaved uncharacteristically. Since that time, I had got to know her alone. I had also got to know her family. I hadn’t known them before. So, taking what I learned from watching them and what I had learned from being with Joan and Gerry over the course of ten years and being with Joan for another 23, I could add, as I went along, everything I had found out for myself.
As Joan started out alone, that’s where I’ll begin.
CHAPTER ONE
A SPARK
Joan was conceived in the spring of 1914. It was a one-night stand and, from that moment on, the father would have no more to do with the flirtatious, dark-haired seventeen-year-old, Kate Littlewood. Fortunately Kate lived at home and had a job as a showroom assistant for a brush manufacturer in south London. The mysterious father had a job in the City and was thought to be rather posh. Apart from that, nobody knew much about him.
When Kate told her father, Robert Francis Littlewood, of the unwanted arrival, he did not climb on to a moral high horse. After all, his daughter brought home her wage each week. He simply went off, found the man in the City, took him through the courts and got him to guarantee six shillings a week towards the child’s upkeep. After that, the father was rarely mentioned.
On 6 October 1914, during one of the early blackouts of the First World War, Joan was born, through no fault of her own, as she put it, in Stockwell, at the Clapham Maternity Hospital.
In later years, Joan said that as a small child she was nearly autistic, but then autistic was a word she liked the sound of, with its aura of mystery and isolation. If she had been faced with genuine autism in another person, distress would have sent her off, leaving someone else to cope.
Rather, Joan was a child with imagination but nobody much to talk to, except some chickens in the back yard, because until the age of six she was an only child. When one of the chickens had its neck wrung to provide a meal, it was the loss of a friend. Along with mutton stew, the greasy surface of which turned her stomach, chicken was a dish she refused to eat for a long time.
At Number Eight Stockwell Road, where the family lived, washdays depressed her and, outside, her spirits were not lifted. All she saw were identical streets, dusty privet hedges, lace curtains and geraniums in window boxes. At the top of the road, she was to look up at the long list of recently killed young men on the new cenotaph as it was unveiled by a reverend in a dingy surplice, the crowd moaning their responses.
Kennington Park, to the east, was no better. Joan knew that Bonnie Prince Charlie’s men had been brought there for execution in 1746 and had not been executed, but massacred. To the west was the fever hospital, beyond that the road to Clapham, and beyond that the cemetery. For Joan, SW9 was a no-place.
She was aware that there had been talk of sending her to an orphanage. On the one hand this would have made her feel wobbly, uncertain whether she should exist at all, but on the other hand, looking around at what she’d been lumbered with, a rundown neighbourhood and an uneducated family, she could have been inclined to bolshiness. Perhaps her unknown father was handsome, clever, and witty, with a house in a smart neighbourhood. Stuff Kate and stuff Stockwell.
Kate had a temper on her, and with Joan around lacked no opportunity to use it. Once, she chased her daughter around the house with a carving knife because the little girl had tossed her head at her.
Kate called Joan heartless. Joan, when talking of Kate, called her a slut. When writing about her, she avoided the word. However, by portraying her as a flirt and a gambler – even if it was only betting on horses – she implied it.
Still, for all the greyness and bad temper, there were moments of delight in Joan’s childhood and she described them with affectionate detail: the receiving, every birthday, of a box filled with beautifully wrapped William pears from her father, winter evenings with Robert Francis and her grandmother Caroline Em, and above all, reading.
Caroline Em had worked in a pub that served food, the Fox and Goose in Threadneedle Street. There, just by watching, she learned how to cook. Joan loved what she served, except for the mutton stews and the chicken, that is, and, from then on, preferred robust English dishes like steak and kidney pudding and bangers and mash. For the rest of her life, whenever she was unsure of what she was eating, she would arrange it on the plate and then arrange it again, a childhood habit that made any cook’s heart sink.
In the evening, after the meal at Number Eight, Caroline would sit in the kitchen and take up her sewing. With her tiny nose and her silvery topknot bun, the picture she made was already pretty but then, as she stitched, she gave a little perfor
mance. Dishes at the Fox and Goose were conjured up in words, tales of the royal family’s private life were recounted, and ditties were sung. Joan loved it. What she did not love were bank holidays when plans to go to exotic Golders Green foundered as Kate lingered in the pub, leaving her daughter outside with a dry biscuit.
Fascinated by Caroline’s sewing as Joan was, it was never to become one of her own accomplishments. Darning, she insisted, did. It would be a brave person, though, who would have put her to the test. A demon of destruction lurked inside her ready to jump out when it came to activities and objects that held no interest. Baths overflowed and saucepan bottoms burned. It was the same with gadgets: she admired them but couldn’t work them. Merely at the approach of her questing fingers, they would fall apart or explode.
It was different if Joan loved something. Flowers, she adored. She arranged them not only well but originally. The same went for laying the table when guests were coming. That could be left to her and the result would be enchanting. The mysterious wooden box and the tissue paper that the William pears came in probably attracted her more than the actual fruit.
Reading was different. It was not only a love, it was the beginning of escape. Her first school was one of the British and Foreign Society’s Practising Schools, this particular one at 21 Stockwell Road. There, she struck lucky. Yes, she was bright and came top in everything but also the teaching was surprisingly good. The schoolmistresses were women who had lost their husbands-to-be in the First World War. They had a vocation which led them out into the world, right across it sometimes, in order to teach. First they had to practise, though, and that’s where Joan benefited.
Many children don’t like school. For Joan, it was liberation. As soon as she could read, she was lost in books, her first supply arriving by chance. It happened in 1920, when her mother, Kate, married James Morritt, an asphalter. Joan, aged six, was the reluctant bridesmaid. The newly married couple moved to two rented rooms at 33 Stockwell Road, leaving Joan behind with her grandparents. To fill the empty rooms at Number Eight, they took in lodgers and, as these lodgers moved on, so they left books. The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, She by Rider Haggard, Opium Dens of the East End, and Under Two Flags by Ouida: Joan devoured them in no time. Having done that, and having decided what was suitable – blooming for her was a swear word – she read a chapter a night to her grandparents, who themselves couldn’t read.
A year later, in 1921, Joan’s half-sister Betty Morritt was born and, in 1923, along came plump, smiling Mildred who was always known as Millie. Joan was not best pleased. For a start, they were too young to be company and, worse, she had to make herself useful. It was off to Clapham Common for her, pushing them and her aunt Carrie’s baby in a pram. She hated it. She hated making herself useful in principle. One can add brain fever to autism on Joan’s list of attractive disorders. She dreamed of having it when asked to fill the coal bucket. ‘No, I can’t. I’ve got brain fever,’ is what she longed to say. The idea came from an episode she had read in True Stories in which the heroine was struck down with it.
When it came to Clapham Common, the best Joan could do was tuck a book in the pram, settle under a tree, leave the babies to their own devices and read the next thrilling chapter. The inevitable happened. When it was time to go home, Millie, a toddler by then, had toddled off. She was nowhere to be seen. After searching the Common, Joan had to go to the police station. There she found Millie gurgling and smiling on a policeman’s knee. All Joan could think was: ‘He seems to be doing a better job of it than me.’
Kate gave birth to two more Morritt children, Jim, and Jeremy who was known as Jerry. In conversation Joan was always careful to speak of all four – Betty, Millie, Jim and Jerry – as half-sisters and half-brothers. Jim, in contrast, said they always referred to Joan as their sister, not half this or half that, and, what’s more, his opinion of Kate was quite different. He thought she was a decent mother and defended her angrily when there was any accusation of slut.
By the age of twelve, Joan had tried to leave home three times. She was edging away, not only from Stockwell but her family too. She recalled Kate at that time saying: ‘Stuck up little bitch, too big for her boots.’ In later life, there was a word Joan used: ‘ethnic’. She didn’t use it then but her particular meaning of it, based on what she saw around her, was beginning to evolve. It was not a compliment. ‘Ethnic’ meant accepting without question what had been handed down to you. If you didn’t ask questions you were stupid, so from the beginning Joan’s feelings about the working class were mixed. When, as a whole, it came under attack, she stood up for it but, if she thought one member of it was backsliding, that person would be scorned.
Her stepfather was a little different. He was all for the Society of Asphalters attaining Union status and tried his best to stick up for the rights of both himself and his fellow workers, sometimes getting into trouble for his pains. Joan admired that and, from him, began to gain an understanding of wrongs further afield than home, like hungry, jobless men marching from the north east of England down to London.
Two family traits Joan could never escape were hooded eyes – Kate and all her children had them – and truculence. Some people, even actors in her own company, thought that Joan came, not from working-class Stockwell, but landed Warwickshire gentry. The hooded eyes set you right double-quick.
The truculence came from Kate’s hot temper and James’s orneriness. It was in her half-brother, Jerry, when, as an adult, he took his employers to court, dismissed his counsel and defended himself. ‘The freeborn Englishman,’ Joan called him. Sometimes she admired that spirit but not if it was only backed by ignorance. Then she despised it and, when it only led to family rows, she hated it. Backchat was great, but flesh-tearing feuds repelled her. Despite her own ability to lash out, she was not thick-skinned.
Actually, Joan had more than the family truculence. Unlike the others, she seemed to have a deep well of anger inside her. It burst out in a boiling torrent that made grown men tremble and women cry. From her diary entries, it is clear that she was aware of this anger and, because it came from her family links, hated it all the more. ‘You do that and I’ll kill you,’ she hissed at Betty during a birthday party for Millie. Betty, without pause, shot back equally vicious words. It looked as if they were going to come to blows. Were they six years old? No, Joan was in her 70s, Betty not much younger.
In Betty you could see Joan’s retiring side. Joan may have been tough at work, but away from theatre she found difficult situations hard to face, like birthday parties at which she was the birthday girl. From most of them, she ran away. Betty did that too. She was a mirror image of Joan, only the silvering had worn away in places.
Not all parties drove Joan away. As long as people didn’t stand around talking, she could enjoy them as much as anyone else. What she liked was singing and dancing, just as she remembered from a party one Christmas when she was little.
For a few hours, the crackling fire and the colourful decorations created a fairyland that took her away from Stockwell. The pleasurable lead-up to this was the preparation of the pudding, the stirring and the tasting. It took weeks. Closer to the day was the choice of roast, in this case a large piece of beef taken from the rump. It was called an H-bone, the kind of cut Caroline had seen displayed at the Fox and Goose. To look at it was spectacular, and eating it was not bad either, as long as you knew that it had to spend hours in the oven to get the toughness out. On the actual day came the getting in of booze: a crate of stout, a bottle of gin, a bottle of whisky, port and lemon, rum and peppermint. At teatime, neighbours and relatives came to call. James, having laughed a neighbour into silence for singing operetta, took over to play songs on the piano that were easy for anybody to sing along with. That in turn stirred everyone into shifting the furniture so that the carpet could be rolled up for dancing. This was the bit Joan liked best as she had invented her very own dance. When she recounted the events of t
his day, it was impossible not to think of Mr Fezziwig’s party in A Christmas Carol and yet she didn’t like Dickens.
At the Practising School it was soon noticed that Joan was scholarship material. This was all very well, but she had a horror of exams. The first time she was supposed to take one, she was sick in a drain on her way to school. Back at home, Caroline wrapped her in a soft shawl, put her in Robert’s armchair and fed her on sponge cakes accompanied by sips of soda water. With exam day over, Joan felt better.
When the exam day for the scholarship arrived, Joan simply didn’t turn up. Only when she thought it would be over did she feel it safe to return. She was met by an unwelcome surprise. Miss Barnes, her teacher, had arranged for her to take the exam on her own. With a deadening weight of responsibility bearing down on her shoulders – no one else in the family had done anything like this – Joan tried to write her essay, A Day in the Life of a Penny. Feeling awful, she struggled on, convinced she was making a hash of it but, no, she won the scholarship. It was to La Retraite School in Clapham Park.
At La Retraite, she had to wear a uniform. Jim said how proud she was of it, but behind his words could be heard the widening gap between Joan and him, and the rest of the Morritts. Every night, before going to bed, she arranged her uniform with the care she took over laying the table.
That kind of attention, did not, however go to one particular item of clothing she was given to wear. This one was nothing to do with uniforms and school. It was a brown velvet dress which she had to iron first because it was a hand-me-down. If you add together a garment that had been worn by someone else, her dislike of being useful, in particular her dislike of ironing, plus her aversion to the colour brown, it is not hard to predict what happened next. Attempting to dispel the dullness of her task, she brought a book to her ironing and, during an exciting chapter, let the iron go right through the velvet. Although she often recounted that incident, she always left it unadorned. By not commenting, she was making the accident appear to come out of the blue, she being no more than an absent-minded innocent.
