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by Julie Andrews

  MUM AND POP were second top of the bill in what promised to be a good show, starring the comedian Frankie Howerd on the Central Pier.

  Frankie was a kind man who kept very much to himself. He seemed shy and, I thought, rather lonely. Onstage, though, he was outgoing and extremely funny. Untidily toupeed, tall, lumpily shaped, and shabby, he was full of bluster and spittle, his eyebrows raised in mock surprise and outrage as he related the trials and tribulations of his life. He would lower his voice conspiratorially to share some appalling confidence. Indicating his humorless female accompanist, he would say, “No, don’t laugh. Poor dear, she’s had everything removed.” He sang “The Three Little Fishes,” with explosive sounds, contorted facial expressions, and body movements each time he arrived at the refrain, “Swim, swam, dittem, dat-tem, what-tem, CHU!”

  I was working in the center of Blackpool theater, at the Hippodrome, in a variety show much like Starlight Roof, called Coconut Grove. A comedy team, Jewel and Warriss, topped the bill, with Jeannie Carson (Pat Kirkwood’s understudy from Starlight Roof, who had since come into her own) and Wally Boag. I was billed as “Julie Andrews—Melody of Youth.” Once again, I came out of the audience to receive a balloon toy from Wally, and once again I sang an aria, twice nightly.

  My parents rented a small row house in St. Anne’s, which was a decent little suburb outside of town. Miss Knight came with us for the first few weeks, until the summer holidays began.

  I didn’t see much of my own show, because once I’d done my turn, a taxi would take me to the Central Pier, where my parents were performing. For the next hour or so I would either walk the pier with Donald and play the slot machines like the tourists, or watch Mum and Pop’s show. The taxi would then take me back to the Hippodrome in time for my second appearance, after which it would take me home.

  Mum and Pop’s show ended much later than mine, so I would come home to a quiet house save for Miss Knight, who would usually have set out a salad for me to eat.

  One night, just before she left, Miss Knight said, “Let’s have scrambled eggs.”

  “I can’t cook,” I said. “I don’t know how.”

  “When I’m gone, you’ll need to know how to make yourself something,” she replied. “I’ll show you how to make a scrambled egg.”

  Every night from then on, I would come home and make myself a scrambled egg before putting myself to bed.

  There were some nights when I went directly to the pier and waited for my parents and we’d all come home together, but Mum was fairly strict about my getting to bed early.

  It was at this point that I really began to notice how much my stepfather was drinking.

  As the summer progressed, it became increasingly difficult for me to watch their act, because by the second show Pop was very obviously drunk. I would sit in the audience agonizing as he began slurring and forgetting lyrics. My mother would try to push him through the songs with her accompaniment, and she would keep up a good face, but I was acutely embarrassed for them both. I couldn’t believe Pop would behave like that onstage. I don’t recall my stepfather drinking a great deal before Blackpool, but I may have been too busy to pick up on it.

  He and my mother began to fight. I would hear them come home and soon there would be raised voices, then scuffles and thumps, followed by my stepfather slamming out of their bedroom and into the guest room.

  I lay in bed, listening, worried about what might happen—what Pop might do to my mother. It seemed that she often baited him. She was no doubt angry at his being drunk onstage, but I sensed something else as well. Perhaps having had a father who beat her, there was a compulsion to recreate that. It seemed to me that it was almost a thrill for her to whip him up to the point where he might become violent. I got the impression that she would physically press herself on him and he would fling her off, and she would cry, “No, Ted, NO!” It appeared to be almost ritualistic.

  Occasionally I would come out of my room to try and stop them—my room was next door to theirs on the same floor—and once in a while it worked, but a lot of the time I was too timid. I slept in only a vest and underpants and didn’t have a dressing gown, so I felt insufficiently clad, cold with fear, and embarrassed to show myself in front of Pop. Don and Chris slept on the floor above ours. Once, Donald came downstairs because of the noise, but I scooped him up to block his view and took him away.

  One particular night, there was a big fight and I heard my mother weeping. An enormous scuffle followed, then a terrible thud, and I knew she had fallen. My stepfather slammed into the guest bedroom, and I simply had to go and see if she was all right.

  My mother was a basket case. I couldn’t console her, and I didn’t know what to do.

  “I think you’d better call Auntie Joan,” she said between sobs. “Ask her if she could get up here.”

  “I don’t know Auntie’s number,” I stammered.

  “Here it is.” She scribbled on a piece of paper. “Go down to the phone in the front hall and dial.”

  Wearing only my undergarments, I crept down the four flights of stairs in the dark and groped my way along the hall to the lamp and the old-fashioned dial phone. When my aunt picked up the receiver, I burst into tears.

  “Auntie! Mummy says can you come?”

  While we were talking, I heard a door open. I became aware that someone had come out onto the upstairs landing and was listening to my conversation. To this day, it remains a mystery to me as to which of my parents it was. Pop would probably have been too drunk, and of course he could not have known that my mother had asked me to make the call. But it seemed odd that my distraught mother would come out and listen to what I was saying downstairs. If she was able to do so, why hadn’t she made the call herself?

  Auntie came as quickly as she could. I’m not sure if she came mostly for us children or for my mother, but the feeling of having someone else in the house created a degree of safety for me. It took the weight off somehow—I didn’t feel quite as responsible for the boys, for the house, or for my mother’s well-being.

  Auntie stayed for the rest of the summer. Pop made some effort to pull himself together, and with Aunt in the house he did seem to calm down for a bit. I know he wasn’t happy that she came, as she was always a thorn in his side. Whatever the case, the improvement was short-lived.

  There was a publicity photo taken during this period of the family walking together along the front at Blackpool, looking very happy. These days, my brothers and I marvel at how far removed that photograph was from the reality of what was actually going on.

  POP CONTINUED HIS descent into alcoholism fairly rapidly, going on ever-worsening benders. He would be filled with remorse afterward, and occasionally go away and “take the cure”—I never knew where. It was always a tremendous relief when he wasn’t around. Then he would come home, and life would resume as before—tense and unpleasant. Sometimes he would be sober for six months or a year, but being a true alcoholic, he would eventually fall off the wagon again.

  Mum would issue a warning that Pop was on a new rampage. There followed an agonizing wait for him to come home from the pub.

  There was always this feeling of “When is he coming? When is he coming?” and “What will the damage be this time?”

  Finally, he would stagger up the long drive and immediately go into the downstairs toilet to vomit. We could not use the toilet for the rest of the day, the stench was so overwhelming. Then he’d pass out and sleep it off.

  At the beginning, Mum didn’t go much to the pub, but eventually, I think because she couldn’t stop him, she joined him. Ultimately, she, too, became an alcoholic. I always thought, in that somewhat clear way that children have, that she did it out of helpless rage. In retrospect, she probably always had a tendency to drink, inherited from her own father. Between the two of them, things got very difficult.

  They continued to fight with each other, but he never threw her around again the way he did in Blackpool. What I sensed more than anything else
was an estrangement; they ended up having separate rooms. Pop slept at one end of the house and Mum slept in the room next to me. Occasionally, Mum would follow Pop and bait him, and sometimes I would hear Pop going into Mum’s room very late at night—so there was obviously some physical life between them once in a while—but mostly they were apart, which probably lessened the incidences of fighting.

  I suspect the music hall booking agents became aware of Pop’s drinking, because it wasn’t long thereafter that he stopped being hired. He couldn’t get work in the theater, so he became a cash register salesman.

  DEPENDING ON MY schedule, Mum sometimes sent me off to visit Dad for a weekend. Chris was now three, and I had been looking after him since he was a baby, changing his nappies and tending to him. Even then I didn’t feel he was getting the care he needed. But now I was caring for Donald as well, giving them both lunch, doing their ironing. More and more, it seemed, my mother wasn’t around, and I was always anxious about leaving them.

  (Later, I even ironed Pop’s shirts for him. My mother gave up or was punishing him, I suppose. When he didn’t have a shirt ready to wear for his job, he would ask me if I would be kind enough to press one for him. It was always painful for me. In spite of how I felt about him, it seemed sad that he had to ask the stepdaughter who he must have known had no respect for him to do his laundry.)

  Often the boys ended up accompanying me to my dad’s. When he came to pick me up, these two sad little fellows would be waving goodbye to us, and my father couldn’t bear it. “Daddy Wells,” as the boys called him, would say to my mother, “Can I take the boys as well?” This was always received with mixed emotions on my part, since I looked forward to having Dad all to myself.

  The more Pop drank, the more abusive he became. Donald received his first caning when he was just six. Apparently a less-than-stellar report card from school was the cause, and Pop stepped in and had at him with a walking stick. After that, poor Donald seemed always to be in trouble, and was caned about three or four times a year. His transgressions became such that my mother despaired, and Pop would lead him away to the cold front living room with the awful pink stucco.

  I would stand in the dark hallway and listen to the thwack of the stick or the strap, and the muffled sobs coming from the other side of the door. I would be rooted with terror, awed by the enormity of the sin being visited on a young, defenseless soul, wondering how he could bear it.

  In later years, Donald confessed that it gave him a sort of fierce pleasure to have “got the old bugger so worked up.” But the statement was belied by the pinch of his face, the guarded eyes, and above all, by his trembling lower lip.

  I did nothing to stop the beatings, which lasted so long that I suspected Pop enjoyed it, or could not stop himself. When the door finally opened, Donald would emerge with red, swollen, tearstained cheeks, seemingly mortified that the family knew of his degradation, his spirit beaten into submission. Still I did nothing, for fear of taking sides, for fear that if I reached out, I might be the next recipient. My brain would turn on a dime and I would think, “Well, he had been naughty.”

  For a while Donald would really behave, until the rage in him built up once more and it happened all over again. His relationship with Pop grew progressively more explosive. He would accompany his father to the golf range to retrieve golf balls, and he claimed Pop would actually aim them in his direction, forcing the boy to dodge them and retrieve them at the same time. He finally lobbed all the golf balls over the garden wall into the greenhouse of the Belgrave Recovery Home, which resulted in yet another caning.

  Donald later told me that at age sixteen, just before he departed from The Meuse to go into the Merchant Navy for two years, he went into Pop’s bedroom, took out the canes that were kept in an overhead closet, and in front of his father, methodically broke every single one. Good for him!

  Another dreadful day, little Chris accidentally soiled the toilet seat. Being only a toddler, he hadn’t thought to clean it, and when Pop discovered it he rubbed Chris’s nose in it to teach him a lesson.

  Mum was appalled, but attempted to soften the impact by saying, “You know, at times Pop can be a very kind man. He does have a tender side.”

  At the age of five or six, Don was enrolled in St. Martin’s boarding school in Walton-on-Thames, not far from our house. It was difficult for him. The other children at school would say, “But you live just around the corner. Why are you boarding?” The justification was that our parents were away so much of the time, traveling and performing.

  Chris started boarding school a year or two later, when he was just four. He was terribly homesick, and there was a lot of bed-wetting. It was heartbreaking. I don’t know whose idea the boarding school was, or how Mum felt about sending Don and Chris away—whether or not she felt any guilt. Maybe she felt the boys would be safer. I vowed never to do that to my own children, and worried that I, too, might be sent off.

  Auntie was busy teaching in her studio, making a living, so she was unable to help with the boys. “Dingle” had developed tuberculosis as a result of his incarceration during the war, and he was thin and weak. But Aunt did cook a roast or a stew for us all occasionally, which was wonderful. We would go over to the Bung and enjoy it, or she would bring it into our house. But, like the rest of us, she was scared of Pop, and disliked him intensely. She didn’t really venture into Mum and Pop’s life after that summer in Blackpool, although she was ever-present in mine, and in many ways a second mother to me.

  I began to menstruate, and it happened at a time when Mum and Pop were away. I vaguely knew what was happening to me, and I went across to Aunt and said, “I may be wrong, but…”

  “Oh, Julie!” she said. “You’ve become a woman.”

  I didn’t feel much like a woman. Here I was, singing my big arias and pretending to be “the little girl with the phenomenal voice.” To my shame, I still had to wear the smock dresses that kept my developing chest flat, and ankle socks with Mary Janes. There was not much grace to my growing up.

  SIXTEEN

  DAD AND WIN moved to a village on the Sussex/Surrey border called Ockley. Dad said Ockley had the ideal distribution of education: one school, two churches, and four pubs.

  He and Win bought a semidetached cottage in a row of five, which had once been the gardeners’ quarters of a huge estate. Although very modest, “Leith Vale” had a lovely view across the fields to the manor house.

  Whenever Dad came to pick me up, he would say, “Shall we go home directly, or shall we take the pretty way?” If time permitted, we would drive together through the countryside, choosing all the little roads rather than the main one. We would pass through exquisite villages, and Dad would bring to my attention some feature of the land or explain its historic significance. He taught me to appreciate real English country hedges, and told me what trees and bushes they were made of. We would admire the lilac or mimosa, and the great clumps of rhododendrons.

  One of our delights was to drive over Leith Hill, a beautiful spot below which Ockley lies. Tiny hamlets cling to the side of the hill and the trees on the crown grow in great arches over the narrow lanes. From the top, one can see the South Downs, and my father would point out Chanctonbury Ring—a perfect circle of trees on another hill in the distance, possibly once a Druid site. Dad showed me traces of the old Roman road running through the countryside, now mostly hidden. A tower had been built by an eccentric on top of Leith Hill, in order to bring the elevation up to exactly one thousand feet. To this day, Leith Hill becomes a sea of bluebells in the late spring, a shimmering haze in every direction.

  If time allowed, we would stop for a pub lunch, probably a “ploughman’s”—cheese and pickles and good bread—or a piece of pork pie and a glass of lemonade. Driving with Dad provided wonderful quality time for us both.

  I remember my first stay in Ockley. I have never seen so many daffodils in my life—they were everywhere, in riotous display. Ockley was a hundred times more rural than Becke
nham or Walton. There was a small, ancient church named Okewood, which was in a sylvan setting of exquisite beauty. On the way there, primroses were dotted in clumps beneath birch trees. Baby rabbits scampered and played. The church had been built as a token of gratitude by a man who had survived the attack of a wild boar. It stood on a slight rise; a tiny gate opening onto a pebble path led through the moss-covered headstones to the main porch. Dad loved to visit it, especially at Easter, for then the little chapel was filled with fresh flowers.

  Leith Vale was surrounded by farms. Standon Farm, across the lane, had a bull, and Johnny made me weak with laughter when he bellowed from his bedroom window like a cow and received an answering call from the bull. He and I took a leisurely walk one late afternoon and were just turning for home when we spotted a large bird with a bullet head and an enormous wing span, flying very low along the lane toward us. It was the local barn owl. It did not see us until it was very close, at which point it veered off into a nearby tree. Johnny and I stood utterly still in silence, wondering what the owl would do next. After turning its head several times from side to side, it suddenly dropped from the tree in a straight dive. Its huge wings beat on the grass and it lifted off a moment later and flew right past us again, a tiny rodent in its beak. We rushed home to tell Dad about our wonderful adventure.

  Wherever he lived, Dad’s first priority was his garden, and I remember him sweating it out in Ockley, planting stands of runner beans and rows of potatoes, which were essential to the family. Dad would go out to the nearby ditches with a wheelbarrow and dig up huge, heavy clumps of leaf mold. He worked it into the garden soil, providing it with all the necessary nutrients.