A Postillion Struck by Lightning (31 page)

Life had changed radically. The Late Developer was starting, and not before time, to offer tentative shoots of manhood to a singularly uninterested world. It really didn't worry me very much that no one seemed to care because I cared myself; deeply. I was enormously interested in the change, and studied myself daily with satisfaction and an awe only equal to its smugness.

I knew, of course, early on that I would never be Handsome like my uncles or one or two of the cousins. Standard Beauty was not to be my fortune. But, I reasoned, I had height, good eyes well placed, and a pleasing smile which I encouraged daily in the bathroom mirror, ranging it from Winsome to Brave. A series of exercises which, if forced to watch today, would surely make me vomit.

Even though I was hopeless at skating, at Sports of any kind or at any single thing which needed any form of co-ordination—even in my piano playing the left hand was constantly at variance with the behaviour of the right—I felt that in my half-belted overcoat, my good blue suit, a florid silk scarf pilfered from someone, and my green felt pork pie hat with a feather, I was approaching my golden future with some degree of courage and confidence.

Not to mention conceit. Nothing, up till then, had come along to freeze the tender greening shoots of my April growth, except perhaps my cousin's clear preference for a Canadian hockey playing goalkeeper. On skates. That, to me, simply showed her acute lack of sensibilities.

Perhaps for the first time in my life that third year in Scotland had at last found me “driving my own coach”. The Postillion was on the lead horse. It was a sharply pleasurable feeling.

Of course there was always the Lightning.

During this exhilarating time changes had taken place at home. My father, more and more exhausted by the demands of “
The Times
”, by constant minor ailments, by his deep dislike of what
he called the “Orientals” who had suddenly invaded his Hampstead streets far from the streets of Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Hamburg, became more and more desperate to remove himself and his family far into the country away from them all and settle into “the country house”. Pressured thus by almost constant colds and chills, delicatessens springing up in the High Street, and the growing of the storm mounting in slow-building thunder-clouds over Europe, he started his search in deadly earnest.

This eventually led us all to a big, ugly, redbrick and gabled house in three acres of overgrown gardens in the middle of a common seven miles from Lewes in Sussex.

It had been for sale for a very long time since no one wanted to attempt any work on such a hideous, sullen, uncared-for lump of tile and gargoyles, therefore he bought it cheap, ignoring protests and doubts from my unfortunate mother, and moved us all in, cat, cupboards and cooking pots, at the beginning of 1936.

I was enraptured. Enraptured by the stained glass front door, a stork standing in bulrushes, enraptured by the high rooms, the solid doors, the wide staircase, the overgrown orchard, the silted up pond with a rotting punt, the bamboo grove and the magnolias pressing glossy leaves against almost every window. But best of all, everywhere miles and miles of rolling common blazing with gorse and heather, lizards, slow worms, rabbits, a secret patch of vivid Gentians and a stark white windmill on a ridge. Never better than the Cottage but the next best thing.

In a very short time everything was stripped out: painted white from floor to attics; the stained glass door, to my regret, replaced with oak; the lawns mowed, trees felled here and there, bushes pruned and the pond, my job, cleaned, and the spring which ran through the orchard unblocked. The house, after so many years of neglect and abuse, seemed to breathe and took on a new lease of life. So did my father.

Of course all things have to be paid for. Lally decided that a total Country Life was really not for her. A couple of months in the summer, the Easter and Christmas holidays, that was acceptable. But a whole solitary existence in the middle of a common and seven miles from a reasonable town was asking too much of her patience and love. And in any case, as she pointed out, we were all growing up … and needed her less and less … whereas her parents, Mr and Mrs Jane, were getting on a little and she would be better occupied looking after them in Twickenham.

The improbable baby, now called Gareth, was already banging about on two legs and had both my adoring mother and sister to look after him. All we needed now, she said tactfully, was a nice Village Girl who would come in and take over, now that she, Lally, had set us all on the way.

She left quickly, and without sentimentality, which was not her nature; and with long and earnest promises of holidays in Twickenham she went as quietly as she had arrived in our midst all those years ago in 1925 when she came to us as a Girl Guide with a whistle and her white lanyard gleaming.

In her place a Rubens shepherdess. Elsie Brooks from Barcombe. Auburn hair, sparkling eyes, cherry red lips and a skin like gently flushed alabaster. She was eighteen and turned my head completely. She lived in a little room at the top of the house with a window which looked out on the orchard. I spent many pleasant hours crouched in the branches of a Granny Smith watching Elsie change from her Blue and White into “something pretty” for her day off. In the halflight, half shade of her room, I could see the firm rounded arms above her auburn head, the full, pale, breasts, the lips puckered in a soundless whistle. Ignorant of my yearning love, my muddled fantasies, she shoved in her Kirby-grips, buttoned up her blouse, shrugged into a coat and went off to catch the two-thirty bus from the crossroads for the excitements of Haywards Heath.

Once I summoned up the courage to ask her to let me take her photograph as she was hurrying down the drive to the front gates. Sweetly she sat on the arm of a garden seat, set her hat a little more jauntily, crossed one leg over the other and thoughtfully raised her skirt so that her pretty knee, gleaming in silk, blinded my lens. I asked her to smile, which she did, and with a jolly laugh gave me a wink before she hurried off for her bus. I was so overcome with adoration that a short time afterwards, wandering about in a haze of mumbled poetry, I walked into a tree.

What saddened me more than anything, more than the secret love in the Granny Smith, the longed-for touch from her hand at breakfast passing the sugar, the cherry lips caressing the rim of her tea-cup which I longed to feel pressed against my cheek, apart from all these delicious denials, was the fact that while I had clearly noticed her she had never, at any single moment, ever noticed me.

“Girls like older boys,” said my sister scornfully. “You are
much too young and you can't even dance or anything like that. No girl likes a boy who only builds birdcages and mucks out rabbits. You see if I'm wrong.”

I decided that I would now learn to dance.

“I have met the most delightful woman on the bus today,” said my mother happily. “Mrs Cox. She was an actress, just like me, they live in the next village and she has three children who are just the same ages as you all. Isn't that extraordinary?”

Elizabeth and I were po-faced with disinterest. But she hurried on assuring us that we would all like each other, and that we needed to have young people about and that Mr Cox was very rich and owned the Village Hall where they put on plays twice a year. That slightly shook my indifference, but not enough to want to have to meet the wretched children. However that had been fixed. They were all, not just the ex-actress mother, but the entire family, coming to have tea with us the following week. I said that I was busy building my new Studio, and my sister said that if they came she would go and hide on the common until they left. My mother, undaunted, said we were to please ourselves. If we wished to absent ourselves from our guests she would explain why but she considered it a great pity since we all shared the same interests, were all the same ages, and also, she added, wandering off to the vegetable garden which she now cultivated, if I wanted to dance there was no better way to learn than going to the weekly “hop” which they gave every Saturday night in their Village Hall. However if we wished to be impolite and foolish that was up to us both. Taking her trug basket and a small hand fork she left us thoughtful.

The Coxes were very pleasant. Two girls and a small boy who hardly counted because, like Gareth, he was too young. But the other two were all right. Nerine and Heather (their father also owned a Nursery Garden which grew Alpines, hence their names) liked toads and snakes, rabbits and ponds and both of them liked acting and writing. So far so good. Nerine said that the Dances were “terrific fun” and that all I needed was a suit and a tie and that she would help me to learn in no time at all. It was arranged.

Every Saturday night I dressed carefully, clambered on to my bike and rode the three miles to Newick. The Coxes' house,
“Chez Nous”, was rather grand, much bigger than ours and covered in wisteria and small diamond-paned windows. Before the Dance began we sat nervously in their sitting-room sipping chilled white wine and seltzer with Bath Olivers. I was deeply impressed. Then to the Hall next door where, on a chalked wood floor, I swooped and twirled and fell over to music played on a tall cabinet gramophone amplified through two blaring loudspeakers. This machine was called a radiogram, and no one was allowed to touch it except Mr Cox himself who arranged the records and the dances and jiggled them about magically for the “Paul Jones” and “The Excuse Me Dance.”

The Hall had a stage at one end with blue sateen curtains and a tall iron stove with a chimney which burned lumps of coke and made everyone choke if they danced too close to it. Around the walls droopy flags and streamers from a forgotten Christmas and little rickety card tables with plates of bridge rolls and cress sandwiches. Half time was Tea and Lemonade. The last waltz, when Mr Cox turned down all the lights, and sometimes accidentally turned them off, was at ten o'clock so that everyone could get their coats and the last bus home.

I was better at dancing than skating. At least I could move into the centre of the floor and didn't fall over as often. But I got very stuck with Slow Foxtrots and Quick Steps and really only shone when it came to the “Valeta” or “Roger de Coverley”. I always managed to slip out and have a Black Cat while the Latin American dancing was on; this I found too fast and difficult.

Everyone enjoyed themselves very much. The men tidy in blue suits and dance slippers, the girls in glossy silk frocks with low necklines and little puffed sleeves. We were all very hot and shiny, and laughed too much, especially during the “Paul Jones” when one changed partners with dizzying, often reckless speed. The sweet smell of sweat, Lux Toilet Soap, French Chalk and Camp Coffee was strong stuff. The evenings always ended far too soon.

My favourite partner, because she flattered me outrageously, was Cissie Waghorn who came from Uckfield and who, though rather taller than myself, and two years older, danced beautifully and helped to teach me with patience and care—even getting me to stumble about in “The Conga” which we all thought rather daring and new. One night, after a very spirited, if inaccurate, Thunder and Lightning Polka she told me, sitting together in a red, breathless, heap, that I had Beautiful and Expressive hands.
They were, she said very seriously, an Artist's Hands and Creative. I was overcome. For days I walked about with them hanging limply at the end of my arms afraid to damage them in any way. They were, to me, thick, clumsy, stubby fingered hands. I now thought better of them and started doing more exercises, with the Smiling ones in the mirror. My sister found me, pardonably, repellent.

But little did Cissie Waghorn know that she had started a thread of fire which was shortly to consume my entire being. Not just my dangling, cold-creamed, heavily Expressive hands. Unfortunately it all went to my head, and for a long time I couldn't even lift a cup to my lips without giving it the importance of the Holy Grail. I seldom do anything in half measures.

What I yearned for now was somewhere to show off these things I had learned, the Expressive hands, the Mocking Smile, the elegance of the Slow Waltz. What better than on that blue shrouded stage at the end of the Hall?

All my life I had wanted to be an actor. All my life that is from about the age of four when, draped in a cast off curtain and an old hat with a pheasant's tail stuck in it, I had acted my own plays to myself in my room. Then came the progression, under Lally's care and interest, during the Twickenham holidays … and the plays my sister and I used to “do” up in the barn near the Cottage. Tremendously ambitious plays about the sinking of the Titanic with myself as the Captain (in a sailor's cap naturally) and my unfortunate sister playing Ottoline Morrell (in a wide-brimmed hat with roses on it and a red plush table cloth). I can't think why she had to be Lady Ottoline. Perhaps because I thought that she looked like her and that Lady Ottoline must have been the kind of woman who would have been spunky enough to stay on the ship while they played “Nearer My God To Thee”. That was
my
plot anyway. And I stuck to it.