Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  He put his feet on the desk and rubbed his hand over what was left of his hair, while I sat the other side of his small and worn wooden desk.

  ‘So, Sandra, what are you interested in?’

  Apart from the theatre, I had no idea. I was thirteen. I was probably interested in being fourteen. He handed me a thick sheaf of papers stapled together in one corner. They had that smell of the old Roneo duplicating machines and the bluish type was smudged in places. Each available class, of which there seemed to be hundreds, was numbered, titled and accompanied by the name of a member of staff. The counselor told me to make my selections and return the form to him. This was not as easy as you might think. I had no idea who anyone or anything was. I had no notion of what might be required. Before this I had just turned up at school and been told what to do and when to do it.

  I sat outside in the corridor examining my pieces of paper like a city dweller looking for edible mushrooms on a forest floor. Some of the class titles were so badly smudged that I couldn’t even tell the general area they might be dealing with, so I didn’t choose them. One of the classes which had been printed clearly was ‘drama’. How odd to think the direction of my life might have been determined by a faulty copying machine. Had the words ‘physics’, ‘chemistry’ and ‘biology’ been legible I might today be removing someone’s spleen for a living.

  I seem to recall the final timetable included French, maths, social studies, English and drama. I think games was thrown in for good measure but it was never my strong suit and I have no recollection of it whatsoever — I suspect that I have blocked it from my mind. Even now, when I look through the yearbook at the pictures of all the staff, not one of the ‘Phys. Ed.’ department looks familiar. Actually, one member of staff looks so old and unfit that I can only presume she was included in error. Looking back, it seems a curious system of education.

  Regina encouraged me to audition for the school play. Drama in the school, particularly under her fragrant direction, was a very big deal. The auditorium was massive with a large balcony and seated several hundred people. With its wide wooden stage, red velvet curtains and rows of tip-up seats it looked like a proper theatre. Each fall a straight play was produced and then in the spring, a full-scale musical that was always recorded and turned into an album. Joining MHS Drama was no mean feat.

  It must have been late September when I turned up for the open auditions. I wore trousers, a big bulky sweater and carried quite the strangest book bag you can imagine. The physical size of the school meant everyone humped their things around in something, but the world of the rucksack had not yet come of age. Most people had a sort of satchel and a few still transported their stuff with a book strap, a piece of leather like a belt which you cinched around your volumes to keep them together. My father had brought me back a satchel from Greenland. It was made of seal-skin and was entirely covered in seal fur. It was quite possibly the single most politically incorrect piece of luggage ever created. It was also enormous and I was not. I must have looked as though I had a terrible hump that required both lancing and shaving.

  If that wasn’t enough there were two other counts against me. First of all my haircut. I said it looked as though it had been done by a charity and that may be unkind. Perhaps it was just a barber rushing towards closing time. Perhaps I had worn a hat for so many years of my childhood that when I finally took it off it didn’t occur to my mother to take me to a proper hairdresser’s. I had very blonde hair, cut short and swept across the top of my head with a low side parting. The second was the complete set of railway tracks on top and bottom teeth, which I’ve explained kept my mouth shut but I forgot to mention also preserved pieces of old food.

  All the kids who were already confident of jobs backstage were lounging about in the auditorium seats when I arrived. They could relax as they didn’t have to audition. Even I could hear the whispers.

  ‘It’s a boy.’

  ‘It is not. It’s a girl.’

  ‘What’s the name?’ Someone looked at the list where I had signed myself confidently as ‘Sandra’.

  ‘Sandra! Sounds like a girl but…’ said another.

  A handsome boy of about sixteen, called Ray, was clearly what everyone called ‘a shoe-in’ for an acting part. He was obviously well established and was merely attending auditions for form’s sake. From the stage, he announced in a booming actor’s voice beard by everyone, ‘She’s a girl. She’s in my English class — she wore a dress on the first day of school.’

  Cathy arrived late. She waltzed in with the confidence of the beautiful and the thin. She shook out her long hair and said, ‘Sandra’s in my social studies class. Hey, Sandra, what’s with the book bag? How weird is that?’

  I smiled. I still thought the book bag was cool but I tucked it under a seat. Ginger arrived, carrying a large number of books in her arms. Ginger was a senior and a Grade A student. How she managed to fit in the acting with all her work no one knew. What they did know was that, like Ray, for her auditioning was a mere formality. She was already a leading light in the drama department. Ray wandered over to flirt with her, confident of his place. Then Regina stood up to announce the play for the season. A petite and attractive woman, as she spoke everyone male and female hushed and became a bit reverent.

  ‘We’re going to be doing The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder.’

  There was some general murmuring especially from the ‘techies’ about what this implied. To me it implied nothing. I had never heard of either the man or the play. The auditions began.

  ‘Okay.’ Regina clapped her hands. ‘Let’s get you into groups and up on the stage. First, we’re going to imagine you’re in the Arctic, okay? It is very cold. Let’s go.’

  I froze in the Arctic, I suffered in the Sahara, I went on to pretend I was a tree, that I was unexpectedly growing or dying or a cat… The kind of thing that is supposed to express the very heart of make-believe. The auditions lasted a couple of days. I didn’t bother to read the play. I just wanted in, so when I found I had got the role of Gladys Antrobus I had no idea what that meant. I particularly didn’t understand that I seemed to be sharing the part with Rita and Cathy from my social studies class.

  Regina explained. ‘Now this is a complicated play. The Skin of Our Teeth is the story of the Antrobus family. It is set both in prehistoric times and in a modern-day New Jersey suburb. It’s about family life but it is also about the vast dimensions of time and place. So, what we are going to do is have the kids in the play, Gladys and Henry Antrobus, played by six different people. In the first act, Sandra and Billy will be Gladys and Henry when they are small children. In the second act, Rita and Ray will play them as teenagers and in the third act we have our older Gladys and Henry with Cathy and Mike.’

  Fran, the stage manager, pushed her glasses back on to her nose and began giving the call times for rehearsals.

  ‘So, Monday afternoon — the whole Antrobus family, all the Gladyses and Henrys plus Mr and Mrs and Sabrina.’

  Six of us became the Gladyses and the Henrys. Everything took place out of school hours and had nothing to do with what year we were in. Consequently we were a mixed-age bunch. I was easily the youngest, while Ginger, who played Gladys and Henry’s mother Mrs Antrobus, at seventeen, nearly eighteen, was one of the oldest.

  I think it was Lori or maybe Sue, at any rate it was one of the backstage crew who saw Rita, Cathy and myself arrive one day for rehearsal and called out, ‘Here comes the Gladys Society!’

  Everyone loved Ginger who played our mom. Then someone noticed her initials, GS, were the same as the Gladys Society so we decided she could join. We took to socialising at Sue’s house because it was big and her parents never seemed to be around. Her initials, SG, were nearly the same so she joined. I had always been Gladys One because of being the first on in the play, Rita was Two, Cathy Three and as each new person joined the fold they received the next available number. Soon, almost every female in the company was part and parcel of
the Gladys Society. Ten high school girls, aged thirteen to eighteen, and of course, Regina. Eventually we would be twelve, as I will explain, but that year there were eleven Gladyses. The women of the play formed a group of friends that was to sustain many of us for years to come. I wonder if there is a tiny sociological study to be drawn from this? I don’t believe there ever was a Henry Society.

  It should all have been splendid and, in fact, I thought it was.

  But after that one year I was packed off to English boarding school.

  With my departure abroad, the Gladys Society transmogrified into People from the International Gladys Society or PIGS. That was thirty years ago. I didn’t know then that that year at Mamaroneck High School was to be one of the happiest times of my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  Going Back

  There is one kind of extravagance rapidly increasing in this country, which, in its effects on our purses and our habits, is one of the worst kinds of extravagance; I mean the rage for travelling…

  Mrs Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, 1883

  I have been blessed all my life with being a person who has never once knowingly had their finger on the pulse. If there is a zeitgeist floating in the air then I will almost certainly find some kind of spray to get rid of it. However, there does seem to be something of a vogue for seeking out old friends. Hardly a week goes past without some well-meaning shop assistant or chiropodist asking me, ‘Have you logged on to the Friends Reunited website yet?’

  The answer is I haven’t. I was rather put off by a chum who declared she was getting nowhere with her social life and wanted to seek out some friends from the past. She logged on, and a week later the only person who had contacted her was her sister who lived round the corner. But there is a fascination with tracking down the significant fellows of one’s past life, of trying to put a bit of personal history in perspective. I think there is also a soap-opera element to it. It’s very satisfying to find out what has happened to so and so, rather like catching up with lost episodes of a drama in which you once took an active interest.

  It was my friend Richard who suggested I track down the Gladys Society. I don’t think I would have done it on my own.

  Despite having first circumnavigated the globe at the age of six weeks, I am not crazy about travelling by myself and I can be quite hopeless at arrangements. Richard was not to be deterred.

  He arrived at my house in the country.

  ‘How many Gladyses are there?’ he said, taking out a large notepad which I knew meant business.

  ‘Twelve. Including me, except one joined late and—’

  ‘And how many are you still in touch with?’

  ‘Uh, Rita, she was Gladys Two, and Lori and Sue occasionally. I’ve seen a couple of the others but the rest… well, it’s been thirty years.’

  ‘So they could be anywhere?’

  ‘Uhm, yes.’

  Richard and I looked at a map of the States. It’s a big place and I realised this was not going to be a weekend jaunt. Indeed, the trip was clearly not one trip but several. Even to me the place to begin was obvious. The Gladys Society had been formed in New York and I knew at least two of the women had not drifted all that far from their childhood haunts. Richard adores New York almost as much as he adores the internet. Before I knew I had agreed, he was on-line, booking us on the cheapest flight possible stateside. Richard didn’t have to come but I needed him to. Without him, I would never have gone. The whole idea seemed mad. I had always recalled that year of high school as incredibly golden but it was more than possible that it wouldn’t stand investigation.

  The Bowery, New York City

  An autumnal Wednesday, 2000

  I am back in the USA in search of Gladyses and, I suspect, in search of myself. I am not here, however, for a long counselling session. I have had enough experience of psychoanalysis to realise that therapy is a great way to ruin your self-esteem. But I do have some big decisions to make. My foray into the world of theatre at Mamaroneck High School left a lasting impression. I have just concluded my twenty-first year in professional show business and I am beginning to have the doubts I think I should have had twenty-one years ago. I am not at all sure the life is for me. A fellow treader of the boards once said to me, ‘Being an actor is like being a grown-up but still playing at shops.’

  And then, I have been thinking about my passport. Forgive me while I segue into my rather complex national identity. I come from a Danish-English affiance that produced three children. Each of us holds the passport of the place where we happened to be born. My sister Jeni was born in America and thus holds American citizenship. I arrived in Copenhagen so I am Danish and my brother is a Londoner with the appropriate documentation.

  My dad always used to say, ‘Good job I only had three children because you know, one in four children in the world is Chinese and that would have been too confusing.’

  It’s an old line but it’s always appealed to me as a delightfully unjingoistic position. It is difficult, however, to remain an ardent internationalist. We are all affected and infected by the culture in which we live. When I left the United States, aged fourteen, I had become very American indeed. I had lived there for six years, had adopted a thick New York accent and was American through and through. I arrived at a very small, very provincial, girls’ boarding school in the Home Counties. I had visited relatives in the UK often but I had never lived there. I knew none of the cultural references that natives take for granted and was now three thousand miles from what I regarded as home.

  The woman the school had deemed fit to employ as matron was a mean-spirited, great Bismarck of a woman. Being a girls’ boarding-school matron is a job no sensible person would undertake and, not having a jot of sense in her entire body, she fitted the role perfectly. I arrived with some vague notions of Enid Blyton pranks in the dorm, jolly japes and lashings of ginger beer. Instead the matron introduced me to a new world of utter isolation. If I feel sorry for myself at all, it is for the moment my father departed and left me in that woman’s care. She huffed and puffed her way down the dark corridors ahead of me and threw open the dorm door.

  ‘This is Sandra. She is, I’m afraid, an American.’

  She managed to convey more disdain in that one word than I have ever heard again in any given circumstance. The girls, who were all old hands, couldn’t have been more charming. For the next six weeks they sent me to another new destination — the silent hell of non-communication known as ‘Coventry’. They wanted me to be less foreign. I determined then that nothing would stop me making a life stateside as soon as I was able. Ever ornery but now deeply unhappy as well, I did the opposite of what I had done when I arrived in America: I did not pretend to be English at all. If they wished to exclude me for being American then I would be very American indeed. I told everyone my name was Sandi not Sandra and that I would not kow-tow. Eventually I won them round. It is the classic comic’s tale. I got them to speak to me by being funny. They spoke and they called me Sandi. I had given Myself an American name but I replied in the crustiest of English accents.

  I think it would be fair to say that I suffered some crisis of national identity: I did not feel English, I wanted to be American but I was actually Danish. Over the years, particularly since my dad died young, I have taken great pride in being Danish, in flying the rather attractive Danish flag, but the fact is I don’t live there. I haven’t lived there since I was eight. I have, however, been in the UK for nearly thirty years now and I have begun to wonder about national identity and what it really means. I am toying with greater political involvement in Britain, yet it is a country in which I have never been able to vote. Does the passport you hold determine who you are? I guess I am going back to find out who I was then and who I am now, which I think sounds pleasingly like an American statement. Who knows, I may even have ‘identity issues’.

  I am travelling with Richard. Indeed, I would not be travelling without Richard. He is very English, qui
te big and borderline camp. He has convinced me that this journey is a good idea. I love Richard. He is one of my best friends. As well as coming to New York to track down people who never bothered to look me up, Richard has also convinced me that it would be fun to rent an apartment in the Bowery. We now have an apartment in the Bowery and Richard is not here. He has gone out, leaving me to have the fun on my own. It is early evening and I realise that I am jet-lagged and horribly nervous. What if no one else remembers? What if the other Gladyses never liked me? Maybe the year meant nothing to them and everything to me? The whole search for these eleven women could all turn into an expensive and embarrassing mistake.

  It isn’t a bad apartment. Quite clean and free of the notorious NYC cockroaches that can crunch in the night as you try to make your way to the loo, sorry, bathroom in the dark. There is a large sitting room with a single bed in it, a half-dividing wall to form a double bedroom, a breakfast bar with a pretend kitchenette and a small bathroom. It is all rather modern. A bicycle stands upside down on top of the wardrobe. I cannot tell if it is art or a useful piece of transport. Everything seems strange and unreal.