by Kika Markham
During the filming of Happy Ever After we stayed a night in a hotel in Leeds as we were on location there the next day. We talked and talked, mostly about politics. I felt rather pleased with myself, because we got into a political argument about Paris in 1968 that I won. It was then that I told him about the Socialist Labour League’s Friday night meetings – discussions on Marxism with writers, trade unionists, teachers, anyone dissatisfied with the slow-drip betrayal of the policies of the Labour and Communist Parties – and he said he might come. We also found out that we shared similar experiences, like being sent to boarding school at too early an age, homesickness, playing the piano, France, and both having acted with our parents when we were children. I don’t think I thought we could or would have a future together – he was married and I had a partner – but I felt very much myself with him, and he made me laugh such a lot. I remember thinking if life had been different, I might have liked to have ended up with that man.
I agreed to say goodnight to him in his hotel room, which could have tempted fate and was rather uncharacteristic of me. I opened the door gingerly to see that Corin was already in bed, and tried not to notice that he was wearing pale blue poplin pyjamas, old-fashioned and un-sexy but all the more endearing. We made coffee and tea with the Teasmade and had shortbread biscuits. It felt like Peter Pan and Wendy. We said good night and I walked back along the corridor on its blue and beige flowery carpet. I think I was humming. I wondered whether he might make it to a Friday night meeting.
CHAPTER SEVEN
New Zealand
After Corin’s proposal over the gate we only managed to see each other briefly for the next few weeks, but one day he asked if he could bring his children, Luke and Jemma, down to Lear Cottage for lunch one Sunday. Jemma recently wrote this short memoir about that occasion for The Sunday Times:
I was ten when I first went to Lear Cottage, in the Ashdown forest, East Sussex. My parents, Corin Redgrave and Deirdre Hamilton-Hill, had been separated for three years and, one Saturday, my dad arrived to collect my brother, Luke, and me from our mother’s chaotic and bohemian flat in London, to take us away for the week. I was excited, as I thought we were going to visit my grandmother Rachel, but my dad said: “We’re going to a comrade’s parents.”
This didn’t go down well. My father was heavily involved with the Workers’ Revolutionary Party at the time, so Luke and I assumed this meant another set of dreary rooms with lino floors and clouds of cigarette smoke. Off we set, my heart firmly in my boots, and tipped up at Lear Cottage, so called because of the paintings of Edward Lear that the family owned. It was the home of David Markham and Olive Dehn.
Olive called herself a granarchist and prided herself on not having rules. They had a rescue dog, chickens, some sheep and a couple of pigs. We would be given 10p for a full bucket of weeds and loved nothing better than collecting eggs or taking the pigs for a walk in the forest.
Lear Cottage was small – the Redgraves were forever bumping their heads – and probably built around 1900. It had a porch over the front door, which nobody ever used, and a red slate roof that came halfway down the house. Through the back door was a little room called the nursery, where there always seemed to be a box of kittens, with cupboards full of toys. Beyond that was the telly room, which was lined with books. In one corner was a ventriloquist’s dummy, whose eyes seemed to follow you around. There was also a sitting room with an inglenook fireplace and a piano. My father was a brilliant pianist and would accompany David on his violin.
What we didn’t know was that Dad was stepping out with David and Olive’s daughter Kika. He waited until the end of the week to say that, if we approved, he would like Kika to be his girlfriend. As we’d had such a brilliant time, we said, “Go for it!” – and Lear Cottage became an important part of our lives.
Until then, I had always been wary of politics – I blamed them for my parents’ divorce, and my father was constantly vilified in the press for his views – but through Olive’s example, I learnt that politics didn’t have to be fuelled by aggression. There was a quieter activism that was all to do with how you led your life and the impact you had on others.
Once we had permission from the children to go out together, things started to get serious. Although their careful chaperoning of us (they came on every walk we went on), it was impossible to find time to be alone. Likewise, in the party, due to the almost inhuman responsibilities placed on comrades, especially Corin, who was now in charge of areas of work such as theoretical articles, building membership, campaigning in Equity, selling papers and so forth. But life itself presented us with a daring plan: to meet on the other side of the world. Corin had been offered the part of Sir George Grey, Governor of New Zealand, in the television series The Governor, to be filmed there over some months. And I was due to film The Blood of Hussein, in Lahore, Pakistan.
I could fly from Bombay to Wellington and join Corin for the last two weeks of his filming. It was an ambitious plan (there were no mobiles then), and the film crew and I could have been arrested at any time and the film confiscated because it was one of the first ‘political’ films to be made in Pakistan. In the final week of shooting, I was tempted by a fried carrot and rice dish from a street vendor. I became very, very ill, and was confined to bed in a sort of dormitory in a disused army base in the suburbs of Lahore.
Weak, but determined, I flew from Karachi to Bombay, on to Sydney, then took a small plane to Wellington; but we flew into a terrifying thunderstorm, rocking and bucketing through the air, and, unable to land at Wellington, the plane ended up in Auckland. Eventually all the passengers were steered gently into the airport lounge amongst farmers in shorts and sandals and sounds of sheep and birds that seemed to chime rather than sing. It seemed like a fairy story. We were put up in a little hotel beside the airport, and at 6.00 a.m. we got the plane to Wellington. Only then, from the tiny window, was I able to drink in the beauty of New Zealand – ‘Tropical Scotland,’ someone remarked. Green hills sloping into white beaches, palm trees and scarlet flowers, but for me, it was the tall jabberwocky trees twisting and hanging over the little chapels and red and white houses that perched on the banks of the frothing Whanganui river that I remember. And the lost piglet on the road that we befriended trying to keep him out of harm’s way, and looking for his farm which we never found.
Corin had rented a villa in Days Bay, where the author Katherine Mansfield had lived. All the villas are bungalows and are built on a steep hill. No cars. You go through a little white gate, up stone steps and a steep lane which zigzags to and fro taking you to another little white gate and another bungalow, until you finally reach yours. Each house has a garden competing in intense colours of purple, scarlet, white and yellow flowers with the next, and from ours we could see over the whole bay, over the tops of the dark cedar trees and Surrey-red roofs to the blue ocean, and the ships coming and going. It was just as well that we had landed in Paradise, because I then found the ensuing days very disconcerting.
Going to see Corin on location on the first morning I was transfixed to see him standing, in costume, waist-deep in a wide brown river, embracing a Gauginesque brown-skinned Maori woman whose black hair flowed down her back into the water – and who was naked! The kiss seemed to go on… and on… before the director shouted ‘Cut!’ and he had to shout it several times before Corin seemed to hear it! Later Corin patiently explained that nothing could be heard above the river and waterfall, that he’d only met her that day and that I must surely know he would never be so unprofessional as to take advantage of her. I was not completely reassured. At the beginning of our courtship Corin had invited me to see him in a show in Manchester, The Norman Conquests by Alan Ayckbourn. Corin was very funny, the audience were in stitches, but all I could see was him lying on top of my friend and brilliant actress Margot Leicester and several others in scene after scene. Why oh why did he want me to witness this pornographic orgy? I was gripped by an agonizing and shameful pain: I could not, wo
uld not, share him. I suffered from jealousy in all my relationships. Actors, by their nature, are curious, fickle, insecure people; flirts. They should not live together. I would be more suited to a biologist or vet, but as these thoughts raced through my head I already knew I was falling, falling, falling… with no branches to hold on to. No longer were my parents or the WRP the reference points in life. It was him.
Later that evening in Days Bay, as we were unpacking and getting ready to go out to dinner, I saw a handwritten letter in the bottom of his case, with the words ‘darling’ and ‘love’ here and there, although I couldn’t see properly without picking it up. I was dumbfounded, after all his promises that his womanising days were over I’d caught him out. I stopped talking and started to repack my things.
‘Darling what’s the matter, what are you doing?’
‘Nothing. It’s OK, I’m going back to London.’
‘WHY?’
‘It’s obvious you’ve been in touch, are still in touch with some old flame…’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘I’ve seen a letter.’
‘What letter?’
‘The one in your case.’
He went and looked and pulled it out. ‘This? It’s from you!’
* * *
We drove around the island exploring, swimming in Lake Taupo, taking a ferry to South Island. Entertaining each other with playing different people and seeing who could be the most fascinating and revolting at the same time. Corin won with Sacha Distel. I was runner-up with Liv Ullmann because I made her too nice. It was the nearest thing to the honeymoon that we never had, and the most romantic two weeks of my life.
A year and a half later I became a mother. A common perception, maybe my own, had seeped down to me that I would be hopeless at motherhood, but it turned out not to be so. Harvey was born on 3 February 1979. I had to have an epidural as the labour was taking too long, and that made the delivery harder as I couldn’t feel the muscles to push with. The obstetrician was Iranian and the Iranian Revolution was in full swing. To distract myself from the awful sight of the forceps he was brandishing, I persisted in asking him which side he was on, did he support the revolution, and could he tell me his thoughts about it. I don’t remember his answers, but my first beautiful son emerged with a characteristic half-smile on his face.
Arden was born on 2 October 1983 at the South London Women’s Hospital. The birth was very fast and there were just three people to help: the midwife, and Jehane and Corin – both of whom I accused of trying to kill me as the pain was so intense and it was too late for drugs.
When the boys were little, I worried that Corin would be forever advising me what to do since he was already an experienced parent. Instead I think I helped him recover from his guilt and sadness about leaving Jemma and Luke when he and Deirdre separated, which often made him cry. Corin moved into my house in Balham, which provided Luke and Jem with not just two new brothers but a second home for them to come to.
Our mainstay during my early years of motherhood was a young woman called Sally Simmons. She had worked and lived with my parents in Sussex and had acquired a unique talent in handling pigs, chickens, children and actors (like my father). She was as brilliant at hearing lines as she was at looking after a three-month-old baby, which was necessary when I had television or film work. She even came to Poland where I was working in the coldest of winters, with both boys. I was the sole breadwinner in those days as Corin had taken the decision only to work if it fitted in with political commitments, which it hardly ever did. Life in the party was extremely hard for couples with children. We were very dependent on Sally, and continue to regard her as a member of our own extended family.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Difficult Times
On 17 December 1983, Dad died of melanoma. The orgone box and Reich totally failed and his illness was painful and terrible, at the end helped only by our kind country GP. My mother was utterly distraught. She gripped the kitchen table, sobbing in anguish as the undertakers climbed the narrow cottage stairs to take him away. My sisters and I tried to unprise her fingers, but she never said goodbye to him.
Clive Merrison, who had a close friendship with Dad, read a letter from Viktor Fainberg, one of my parents’ Russian friends, and Corin read from Stanislavski’s My Life in Art on An Enemy of the People. All my partners loved my father, and he them. I am so glad he had been able to hold and admire Arden, who was born two months before he died.
Two years later, Michael Redgrave’s Parkinson’s disease worsened, and he died on 21 March 1985. The effects of our fathers’ deaths bled into our marriage. We were struggling. Corin was still carrying Michael’s ashes around in his car, unable to part with them. He didn’t want to put Michael into the cold earth. Oh how I understand how he felt now, with Corin so cold in the ground.
I try to comfort myself by remembering Corin never used to feel the cold, at least not as much as I did. I keep some of his ashes on the bookshelf in my bedroom, so a little bit of him will be warm. Of course, anyone who has lost a precious one and has seen them transfigured or transformed into dust knows that one’s mind simply cannot grasp the reality of that fact. The transformation of the corporeal into powder, the material, the body of King Lear in a massive fur coat (Corin’s), shuffling across the stage, or wearing my father’s weather-beaten brown corduroy jacket, driving the car. You look at that powder and some grown-up part of you pretends that you accept that the remains of bone and flesh and wood and clothes and hair and soul can, through intense heat, be ground up into tiny particles and that if you worked at a crematorium you would be entirely at ease with such concepts and sights. I shall never get used to it. Yet I am comforted by the little blue 1940s tin which says in gold lettering, Player’s Navy Cut Cigarettes – Gold Leaf – and has a sailor’s head, with a ginger moustache, in the middle. I think Corin would have liked it. I wonder where he would have kept me?
Maybe in a coffee cup, or the butter dish.
In the spring of 1985 the WRP waged a campaign to free the sixty-seven miners who had been jailed during the strike. Trade unionists, miners, public health workers, and council leaders marched from Liverpool, Edinburgh and Swansea to attend a packed rally in Alexandra Palace where top-line actors performed a play written by Tom Kempinski and Roger Smith.
On 1 July, the day after this our most successful rally, a letter was read out on the central Committee. The letter accused party leader Gerry Healy of sexual misdemeanours with a number of female comrades. It was the first hammer blow. The next day, on 2 July, the political committee was informed that the party was in debt to the tune of £250,000 and all the cash reserves were exhausted. This was the second blow.
As Alex Mitchell writes in his book Come the Revolution, ‘Party members with a record of hard-working devotion transformed overnight into… monsters uttering verbal threats as well as physical intimidation’. The party imploded. Healy retired and was only attached to the party as an adviser. But his accusers wanted him expelled, the party shut down. Those of us who wanted to establish the truth through a full inquiry and wanted to keep the party together were called ‘rapists’. Corin was locked in a room for several hours and my front window was smashed in by a dustbin which narrowly missed six-year-old Harvey sitting on my lap.
We had to begin again. We raised funds for a new paper, The Marxist Monthly. Political revolution was sweeping through Eastern Europe and Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was the era of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction). We went to Moscow, experiencing the enormous change in the Soviet Union, meeting with members of Memorial, an organization dedicated to the memory of the victims of Stalin. Glasnost meant that archives could at last be opened and read, accounts from the gulags that had never seen the light of day. It was a tremendously exciting time to be in Russia then. Much later, we founded a party that was based on human rights – Peace and Progress, and the Guantanamo Human Rights Commission.
&nb
sp; Back in September 1985 I was trying to arrange our wedding, which had been cancelled once owing to the traumatic situation in the party. They weren’t fashionable then and I had never even been to one (except in the TV play with Corin). I had no idea what to wear. Luckily, my friend Eluned Hawkins, suggested I ring Shirley Russell the designer. Shirley had made a costume for me in Clouds of Glory, Ken Russell’s film about Coleridge. She found an elegant black 1940s suit with hat and veil which I liked very much.
We were married on 5 October 1985, an Indian summer’s day. My mother made a beautiful spread at the cottage, and we ate outdoors in the autumn sunshine.
‘I never thought we’d see the day,’ said Jehane, as we were about to drive off.
CHAPTER NINE
1985
Haddock à l’Anglaise
In the first years of being together we both continued to get work as actors, but as our political activities increased we started to be seen as liabilities. Producers were worried that we would hold union meetings during rehearsals, or, even worse, in the lunch hour! That was never the case, but Corin’s career suffered through years of blacklisting.
Corin was a natural father and hated being apart from his family. His commitments to the world, which took up so much of his time and energy, were often a source of grievance to all of us.
Holidays were of huge significance and the moment the front door closed he became a different man and totally available to his children. Once, on the first day of a holiday in Ireland, we were just unloading the car when Arden, who was ten at the time and prone to anxieties, asked if he could talk to Corin about some of his worries.
