Try to Tell the Story

by David Thomson

  Of course, I knew, in the broader sense, that Oxford was not out to cater to me, that it was one of the great European seats of learning, and that Oxford itself was a place that must harbor as many unofficial tastes and pursuits as Paris if you had the time to search. But I was troubled. I did not feel certain that I was cut out for three more years—and, presumably, three intense years—of the kind of study I had done at Dulwich. I enjoyed history, and in studying Namier and Plumb I had got a first sense of Britain as a living organism, and as a place where reading and fiction came along like middle-class hobbies that might replace hunting and building great houses. But to know more about that subject was surely trapping oneself in a life of teaching. And I wanted to do something more creative, or less ruled by club and system.

  Whenever such questions came close to being raised at Dulwich in the preparation for university, we were told that there were years awaiting us that would be the basis for our lives and careers. What have we been doing now? I wondered. And how were these tough years at Dulwich mere preamble? That didn't exactly fit with what I had felt about the place. Dulwich had been an ordeal and a challenge that gave way to a short season of sunshine. I knew that Orson Welles was twenty-five when Citizen Kane opened, and I saw that there was no time to be wasted. Moreover, I knew that in its great Gothic outlines and centuries of tradition Oxford was likely to intimidate me in just the way Dulwich had done.

  There was also the fact that a place at Oxford involved some costs that my family, my father, and I would have to decide whether to face or not. That or I would need to work. Oxford offered me a place. Dad asked what it would cost. This was a moment at which he had made a maneuver with Grandma's house just like the one with ours. When Bert died, Grandma was left poor. So Dad purchased the house from her at a cut rate. She could invest the money he gave her and live in the house rent free. Mum was shocked at what he had done. She thought it was a cruel trick, and that Grandma had been deceived. But no one had the power to intervene.

  So it was in that situation that one day I opened Sight & Sound, the magazine that came with being a member of the National Film Theater. Inside, I found a full-page ad for the London School of Film Technique. It offered a basic course of six months, “a comprehensive course in professional film making,” it said. The curriculum was printed in the ad and covered the theory and history of film; an introduction to camera, sound, and editing; and ample opportunities for practical work. The school facilities included “two studios, editing room, cinema, projection room, dark room, lecture theater and workshop.” It was located on Electric Avenue in Brixton, only a few miles from where I lived.

  In 1959, this was the only site of any film education in Britain (apart from the BBC, where in television there was a trainee course). Not one university or college in Britain offered any education in film, whether criticism, history, or filmmaking. I had by that time accumulated notebooks that included about two hundred handwritten reviews of films I had seen. It seemed to me—with Mum's encouragement—the only sensible thing to do with the desire and energy I had for film. My model for those reviews, I suppose, were the pieces by Dilys Powell that appeared in the Sunday Times. She was another voice on the radio program The Critics, and I liked her voice and often shared her views, though even then I think I saw more virtues in American film than was common in those days.

  I began to think of what might even be a choice, though I hardly dared mention it to anyone else except Mum—and she was in favor of Oxford. She said if I still wanted to I could do the film school later. At that time, her job was as secretary at a firm of accountants, and one of the partners at the firm was David Lean's father. She asked the father what he thought, and in due course a letter came to me from Lean. It was an enormous kindness and later made me feel guilty over not liking his final films. It was a careful letter in that it encouraged me but told me to be sensible. An Oxford degree would permit so many other things. Anyway, good luck.

  A little research revealed that Lean himself had missed university, that he had started as a clapper boy at sixteen and had studied every craft of film as best he could—most notably editing—on the job itself. And he was married six times.

  I went to look at the school on Electric Avenue. Upstairs in the school I met young people who taught there and I liked them. I saw the premises and guessed even then that the advertisement was on the generous side. But there were students all over the place and they were making films. It would be one hundred pounds for the basic course. I was given to understand that with my school record if I cared to apply there was a good chance I would be admitted.

  They would have enrolled Puss in Boots if he had had a hundred quid.

  Mum said I should talk to my teachers at Dulwich. Ernie Williams was genuinely shocked, as if all the work and care he had put in might be for nothing. “I believe you may be making a grave mistake,” he said, and I did not doubt him. The school was horrified: its identity and plan were being questioned. Going to Oxbridge was the one way “class problems” could be finessed. But we got into talks such as we had never had before about life and I think he was impressed by my own feeling that I'd found something that was probably a mistake, et cetera, but right for me. He hadn't realized how many films I saw or the way I wrote about them. David Henschel was more neutral. He said he guessed I knew my own mind, and there was no earthly need or reason to do as you were told beyond a certain age. It was just that he had never found out the age!

  Then Dad came to me, from out of nowhere. He didn't want to know what I felt about the choices. He didn't seek to know who I was. But he made this offer: he'd pay the £100 for the film school if in return I expected and sought nothing else from him in the way of later costs at university. If I changed my mind, it would be up to me. Vaguely aware that this objective observer was the owner of three houses—for there must be a house somewhere that he lived in most of his days—I felt the offer was, characteristically, to his advantage. In the long term, he was true to his word, for he left me nothing in his will.

  I determined then and there that I was going to need to concentrate. If it was going to be film, then film it was. I decided to stop playing cricket. Within a week or two, the batting pads that Dad had given me and the very good bag for holding my equipment vanished. They were all gifts, but he reclaimed them. I don't know what became of them, but I was startled by the cold-bloodedness of it all.

  The Dulwich establishment was grave and concerned. Ernie Williams never gave up trying to dissuade me. He was eager to have me believe that Oxford would be a great window on the world, and that academia was the threshold for everything I cared about. But then I found a book (a slender Penguin) called Picture, by Lillian Ross. It was an account of the making of a film called The Red Badge of Courage by John Huston. It was not a film I liked very much, but the report of how the men on the production thought and maneuvered during the job was fascinating and seemed to suggest a kind of everyday acting in show business that I relished. There was a man in the story, Louis B. Mayer, who was the villain of the piece. But he lived the way he talked and he indicated a lurid fairy-tale kingdom in Los Angeles where people existed in the limelight and their own blood and thunder without aging. If I had known then that the daughter and grandsons of Mr. Mayer would one day be my very good friends, I'm sure it would have encouraged my faith.

  Something else happened. In my last year at Dulwich I had been made a prefect. Those were the most senior and privileged boys. We kept order most of the time. We were allowed to leave our jackets undone! And prefects could administer punishment. Well, the prefects had their own room, where justice was done. In my last term at Dulwich this happened. It seemed to me hideous but it helped me make up my mind.

  The captain of the school—never mind his name—was holding court. A boy was up on repeated charges of cheeking prefects. He hadn't stolen anything or deflowered a younger boy—and such things did happen. He hadn't got drunk and damaged school property. At a school where wit and l
anguage were valued, he had said something funny and offensive to a few prefects. This boy—never mind his name—was someone I had known off and on. We had been in the same form a couple of years. We were the same age. We caught each other's eye in the crowded room.

  His guilt was not in question in the mind of his judge, the captain of the school, who then administered what used to be called “three of the best”—strokes of a cane on the upturned bottom, though “strokes” is the wrong word. Nor should you believe in the establishment's own definition of “the best.” Those three blows damaged me, no matter what they did to the victim. I doubt that much worthwhile in the school code was protected. I don't know how the “boy”—a young man—took the pain and humiliation in front of the assembled prefects. I daresay it was a kind of retaliation to class hostility: I suspect that the captain of the school paid fees and thought the miscreant was on a scholarship. But even if that was not the case, I didn't need the tradition that was being upheld.

  About ten years later, Lindsay Anderson made a film called If …. I don't know how good a film it is, but it's set at a public school and it has a rogue kid (Malcolm McDowell) who with a few fellows and his girlfriend starts an insurrection at the school. I know the feeling.

  27

  SO I WENT TO Electric Avenue. It was like putting my life in an open socket. I had meant to end this book here, with me at eighteen going on nineteen, with all the shock and burden of a large personal decision, a gamble. Or even a mistake? The film school was not what it advertised itself as, but that didn't get in the way of a massive amount of education, far more than I could organize at first.

  But there was a night on Streatham High Road when I had just got out of a film. Old habits die hard, so I walked a little, and I was going down toward St. Leonard's Church when she stepped off a bus stopped at the lights. Just dropped off its platform the way everyone did. And I wasn't even thinking about her, yet there she was. That's a lot of patience to learn. I walked into the place where she had stopped still, smiling, but with a kind of anxiety on her face. As if maybe she had waited, too.

  “Hallo,” she said. “I thought it was you.” She looked around. “Are you with that girl? She your girl friend?”

  “How are you?” I said. In screen-writing class, I'd had a good lesson that day: answer a question with a question.

  “Oh, all right, you know,” she said—that awful London lament, “all right,” or likely gone in a twinkling.

  “I was looking for you,” I said.

  Her eyebrows went up and she was fifteen again. “You were? Why?”

  “I don't mean tonight. For years.”

  “On the High Road?”

  “Yeah.”

  I could see in her face something disturbed or alarmed by my gravity. After all, she was here, talking. Not vanishing. I was terrified of frightening her. Then she remembered. “We were supposed to see a film, weren't we?”

  “Do you remember what it was?” I asked her. I had waited outside the theater over an hour.

  “It was Guys and Dolls,” she said. “You see, I do remember.”

  “You didn't remember to come.”

  She looked at me—Margaret, are you grieving?—with a smoke of amusement and sadness in her eyes and I felt she might know more about luck than I did. Are you angry or are you sad? Some of us need both.

  “Well,” she said. “I have something to do.”

  “Let me wait for you.”

  “I don't know how long I'll be.”

  “I don't mind.”

  She was thinking about it, so I told her, “I'm not going to let you go again.”

  “All right,” she said, and now it was. She took my hand and we crossed the road. “I have to go to the church,” she told me. There was a Roman Catholic church next to St. Leonard's. There always had been. Her hand felt cold crossing the street and I was not sure what that indicated. So I squeezed her hand and she told me, “Don't worry.”

  “Are you coming in?” she asked, when we got to the church door. I hesitated. “It won't bite you.” And then she said it again, “I won't let it bite you.” So I went in and sat on a chair in the porch while she went deeper into the church for whatever it was she had to do. I could smell the incense and I could see through the gap between black velvet curtains that there was a light on near the altar. Like a night-light. I wondered if she would ever come back. But then there was a swish and there she was, carrying her coat. The material of her dress shone in the pale light and I could see the outline of her body.

  “Can I kiss you ina church?”

  “Best place,” she said. And she leaned her neck back so that I could kiss her. Her lips met mine but did not quite join. She was watching me all the time. “My love,” she said, and then her hands were up on the sides of my head and it was a kiss to cover all the years of walking. I felt her heart beating, and I wondered if she was unwell.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  “Very,” she said. “What are we going to do?” She had a way of asking a question so that it could have turned on the next minute or two, or the rest of our lives. I searched her eyes for a close reading, but then the smile came in that took a nearly carnal pleasure in my young frown. “I'm supposed to get home,” she said, vaguely.

  “Come and have a coffee,” I said.

  “Coffee!”

  “I'll buy you dinner, then.”

  “I've had dinner. I should get a bus home.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Stay with me,” I said. “I'll walk you home.”

  “You walk everywhere?”

  “I like walking. And talking.”

  “Let's do that, then.”

  I helped her on with her coat (it was so heavy, she was so lithe). And we went out onto the street again.

  “Why didn't you come to Guys and Dolls?”

  “Oh, that was long ago. My mother told me I couldn't.”

  “Because I wasn't a Catholic?”

  “She never said that. Because you were so serious. You still are.”

  “You don't like that?”

  “It frightens me.”

  “You have another boy friend?” I demanded.

  She looked at me askance and grinned. “Sometimes.”

  “Now?”

  “You see, you are too serious.”

  “Now?”

  “Not this minute.”

  “You're wrong,” I said.

  “I am?” Always that smile, taunting and leading me on.

  “You've got me now.”

  “Oh, yes,” she smiled, as if I'd just appeared. “You. Well, that settles that, doesn't it?”

  “Are you going to university?”

  “I don't know. Perhaps. What are you doing?”

  “I go to the London School of Film Technique. It's in Brixton. Just started.”

  “A school to learn film? That's funny.”

  “Why?”

  “You don't need to learn that.”

  “You do!”

  “Well, you don't need to learn how to watch them.”

  “That too! I tell you what. I'll take you to the school.”

  “Now?”

  “We can get a bus to Brixton—just a few minutes.”

  “It's nine o'clock already.”

  “It's early.”

  So we caught a bus and we sat upstairs in the front seat as the bus went down Brixton Hill, past the street that led to the prison. “I shot my first film there,” I told her. “About a man coming out of prison.”

  “Who was the man?”

  “An American at the school.”

  She grinned. “Would you put me in a film?”

  “Would you take your clothes off?”

  “Oh, shut up!” She broke into laughter. “All of them?” I shrugged and grinned, the spirit of compromise. “You could take a shoe off,” I said, “so long as it's a high heel.”

  “I've got high heels,” she said. “I wear them at my job
.”

  “What's that?”

  “A typist,” she said, and she felt drab in the admission.

  “A typist! That is absolutely insane, apart from being ridiculous that you are just a typist!”

  She blushed. “You don't even know me,” she said.

  “What did you say?” Right there on top of a bus, a 159, I stared her full in the face and challenged her again to even consider that I didn't know her. “Don't ever say that,” I said.

  “I won't if you kiss me,” she said. “You haven't kissed me for ages.”

  “If you'll promise not to be a typist I will,” I said.

  She giggled. But she was nearly limp with the thought of desire and transformation. She seemed to be watching her own movie, herself on a screen. “All right,” she sighed, and buried her face in mine. There on top of a 159, and for so long that we missed our stop.

  Crossing the road to enter Electric Avenue, she hugged my arm and said, “I'm always told never get off the bus in Brixton.”

  This was the Brixton where Oswald Mosley himself had been seen in the last year at a nighttime meeting, with floodlights and a gang of Blackshirts who might easily have been the wrestlers who trained in Brixton on an off night. There were West Indians new to the area, more every year, and in the market on Electric Avenue you could get plantains, mangoes, and fruits you couldn't name. These fellows were cheerful enough in the daytime, making their way in the busy streets among the insults. But there was natural anger on all sides, and the old Brixton, an underworld haunt that linked up with the notorious Borough High Street, where the cops used to go only in pairs and then never at all, had a political edge now, as Britain suddenly had to come to terms with the idea of shared citizenship. So there was bother about, teddy boys with knives and bicycle chains, and a general air of menace; any girl could have been told to stay on the bus as it dragged through Brixton. The big hill that led to Streatham was the measure of fresher air and greater security.