The Boat Girls (4 page)

Her father took the cutting and looked at it doubtfully. ‘Canals? Canal boats? I've never heard of women doing such a thing. It's a man's job.'

‘Not necessarily – not these days. Women are turning their hand to all kinds of things, and this sounded a very nice idea to me. Out in the fresh air. Very healthy. Working with other women – no men to bother them or take advantage. Something you could be proud of her doing –
essential supplies
, it says. And she could always go back to the bank as soon as the war's over.'

He examined the article more closely. ‘The woman in this picture's wearing trousers. I don't call that very respectable. A woman in trousers!'

‘Well, you wouldn't want them to be climbing around the boat in skirts, Arnold, would you? Going up and down ladders, and things. It wouldn't do at all. Would it, Kathleen?'

Prudence held her breath. If Mother thought it was a good idea, then there was a faint chance that Father might come round to it.

‘No, I suppose it wouldn't, Dot. And I certainly wouldn't want Prudence to go into any of the services.' Her mother lowered her voice, leaning towards her father. ‘Look what happened to Mrs
Watson's girl, Arnold. The air force sent her home in disgrace and everybody's been gossiping about it.'

‘You don't want any trouble like that with Prudence, do you?' Auntie Dot said. ‘Think of all the talk there'd be at the bank.'

Her father laid the cutting carefully on the table beside him and took a sip of his tea. ‘I'll give it my consideration, that's all. I'll think about it.'

Auntie Dot winked at her.

ROSALIND FLYNN HAD
begun her professional acting career at six years old when she had played the part of an extra fairy in an open-air production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. Her father had taken the role of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and her mother that of his betrothed, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The company toured the country during that summer of 1931, performing in gardens and among old ruins and on village greens, rain or shine. When autumn arrived it disbanded. Her parents joined a repertory company in the west of England and appeared in supporting roles in a long string of popular plays, while Rosalind was given other walk-on, non-speaking parts and was sent to the local school. Later, they moved on to join other companies, taking work wherever they could get it, ‘resting' when they could not and always waiting and hoping for the day when they would
finally take the leads and see their names up in lights.

There had never been any doubt that Rosalind would follow in their footsteps and, as their own hopes gradually faded, those dreams were transferred to her. She had the looks and the voice and she had already learned that the smell of greasepaint was the headiest scent in the world, and that the most thrilling sounds were the swish of the curtain and the applause of an audience. By the time she was thirteen she was playing small speaking parts, and every so often the drama critic of a local newspaper would single her out as promising. At fourteen years old she was growing rather tall, which was a disadvantage, but, as her mother often said, there were always plenty of tall male actors, and height lent presence on stage.

And then the Second World War broke out and everything changed. Actors were called up, theatres and cinemas were closed down, finding work became even more difficult and her parents ‘rested' for longer and longer periods. Her father's health – never good – deteriorated. The bronchitis that had plagued him for years became much worse and, even if there had been good parts offered, he would have been unable to play them. When a doctor advised sea air, her parents took out their savings and cashed in an insurance policy to buy a run-down terrace house in a side
street of a south coast town where they let rooms to commercial travellers. As the war progressed and the need for entertainment was recognized, theatres began to open up again and Rosalind was occasionally given small parts at the Winter Gardens – maids, country girls, younger sisters, attendants, Dick Whittington's cat in the Christmas pantomime. The Germans had occupied Europe and the sound of their guns could be heard firing on the other side of the Channel. Before long their fighters came swooping over, rattling away with their machine guns, and their bombers droned overhead en route to attack airfields and London. The expected invasion, though, was thwarted by the RAF and the war took another turn, to be fought out in Greece, and Crete and Italy and north Africa, and in the Far East against Japan.

When she was sixteen, Rosalind left school and worked as a waitress while she auditioned for acting parts. Unfortunately, her height and her looks worked against her. The patriotic demand was for delicate English roses rather than for long-legged redheads of Irish descent.

Now that the Germans seemed unlikely to land on the beach at any moment, the run-down terrace house was sold and a better one bought on the sea front, not far from the Winter Gardens. Actors and actresses, coming and going in
productions there, replaced the travelling salesmen and theatrical gossip was part of life again. There was talk of a completely new company being started up in a provincial theatre by a legendary Shakespearian actor. It was, Rosalind's mother told her, her big chance. She must take the train there and walk straight in. Beg the great man for a part –
any
part, however small. Once she was in and he saw how good she was, the rest would follow.

She had some trouble finding the theatre, wandering around dingy streets past bomb-damaged houses and heaps of rubble inhabited by cats and rats. The theatre had been damaged, too. A tarpaulin had been stretched over a part of the roof and the house doors had been blown out so that she was able, literally, to walk straight in. She opened an inner swing door leading to the back of the stalls, which was in darkness. The stage, though, was lit and two actors were rehearsing. She stood, motionless and unobserved, listening to Orlando and Jaques speaking familiar lines from
As You Like It
.

Jaques made his exit and Rosalind her entrance – a slight, blonde-haired girl, just the right heart-high size for her rather short Orlando. An English rose.

‘Nadine, darling,
do
try to pitch your voice lower and strut about like I showed you – you're pretending to be a boy, remember? A
saucy lackey
. Orlando would rumble you in a second.'

The rich, theatrical voice had come from the centre of the darkened stalls.

The actress said sulkily, ‘I
am
trying. It's the best I can do. Anyway, Paul wouldn't notice if I came on stark naked.'

‘Don't be bitchy, sweetie. It doesn't suit you. Take it again from
I pray you
. . .'

They got as far as
Where dwell you, pretty youth?
when the voice interrupted again – wearily.

‘All right, let's stop there for the moment, shall
we? I think we
all
need a rest. Is anyone capable of making a decent cup of tea?'

She moved then, walking boldly down the central gangway towards the stage.

‘I am.'

Heads turned to stare from the front row and the two people on stage shaded their eyes, peering in her direction. The actress, Nadine, said, ‘Who the hell's that?'

‘I'm Rosalind Flynn,' she said. ‘I'm looking for work. Any work.'

‘You've got a nerve, barging in here. Hasn't she, Lionel?'

The voice spoke languidly from her left. ‘She certainly has, darling. But I'm quite prepared to forgive her if she really can make a good cup of tea. Are you sure that you can, Miss Flynn?'

‘Yes, quite sure.'

‘Show her where it's kept, somebody.'

A plump, middle-aged woman who had been sitting at the front took her backstage where there was a cupboard-sized kitchen with a sink, a cold-water tap, a gas ring, a kettle, some dirty mugs, a teapot, a half-full bottle of milk, a soggy bag of granulated sugar, a metal spoon and a packet of Mazawattee tea.

‘There's a tray around somewhere,' the woman told her. ‘And there should be some matches.' She smiled at her. ‘I'm Beryl. I do the character parts.
Sir Lionel likes his tea nice and strong, just a dash of milk and one sugar. Good luck, dear.'

The matches were in a drawer and she was well used to lighting temperamental gas rings in theatrical lodgings. While the kettle was boiling she emptied the teapot of a wad of old, cold leaves and rinsed out the mugs. She found a tin tray under the sink, and used a rag draped over the waste pipe to wipe off the old ring marks before putting out the clean mugs. When the kettle began to sing, she warmed the pot, made the tea – strong – and poured it out, adding milk. Since there was no sugar basin, there was no alternative but to put the soggy bag on the tray, together with the spoon. One of the mugs was larger and better than the rest and she put one spoonful of sugar in it and stirred it carefully.

The great man, Sir Lionel, was still sitting in the middle of the row, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing, she saw, a black cloak draped around his shoulders, and his thick silvery mane was long enough to reach its velvet collar. She handed him the best mug and he drank from it, paused dramatically, mug aloft, and drank again.

‘Excellent. You're hired, Miss Flynn. Tea-maker and general dogsbody. Seven shillings a week.'

Beryl, the kindly character actress whose husband was away in the army, offered her the spare room in her rented cottage outside town for
four shillings a week and included a hot meal once a day; otherwise she lived on pork pies and Smiths crisps from the local pub. The seven shillings was often late appearing, but somehow she managed. At the theatre, she did everything: making the tea, sweeping the stage and the auditorium, cleaning the Ladies and the Gents, painting scenery, moving props, mending costumes, running errands and prompting from the wings. Nadine, who had resented her arrival from the first, resented even more any prompts she had to be given by Rosalind.

‘Does that girl have to shout, Lionel? She's supposed to whisper. I'm not deaf.'

‘Don't keep blowing your lines, darling, then she won't have to say a word.'

The plays – by no means always Shakespeare – changed regularly, attracting respectably large audiences and sometimes leading drama critics:
The Tempest
,
Major Barbara
,
Much Ado About Nothing
,
The Constant Nymph
,
Hay Fever
,
Uncle Vanya
,
She Stoops to Conquer
. . . Sir Lionel always directed and very occasionally took interesting supporting parts himself, effortlessly eclipsing the rest of the cast whenever he did so. His company, Rosalind soon realized, was made up of actors and actresses who were either too young or too old to be called up, or were unfit for military service. Paul, the actor who had played Orlando, for instance, had flat feet, while the one who had been Jaques
was so short-sighted he kept bumping into scenery, and Nadine was quite a bit older than she had looked from the back of the stalls.

Whenever the air raid warning sounded during performances it was ignored. The audience stayed firmly put, the play continuing without pause to the accompaniment of ack-ack guns booming. A near miss did some more damage to the roof and to the auditorium ceiling, which showered down plaster particles like a fall of snow. One day, as she was sweeping the gangway during a rehearsal, the great man beckoned her from his seat in the stalls. When she stood before him, broom in hand, he looked up at her and smiled.

‘
More than common tall
. . . like your namesake. You'd make a lovely Rosalind, darling, if we could only find you a matching Orlando. Perhaps one day . . . Meanwhile, I'll see if I can find a little part for you soon . . .'

She played one of the spirits attending on Prospero in
The Tempest
, and then Dorcas, a shepherdess in
The Winter's Tale
. The seven shillings went up to nine, though their payment was just as erratic. After that she was given small speaking parts and then longer ones, praise from Sir Lionel and catty comments from Nadine. Over one of the hot meals in her cottage, Beryl warned her.

‘You want to be careful, dear.'

‘What of? Nadine doesn't worry me.'

‘I'm not talking about her. It's him.'

He took her to dinner at a restaurant one evening. Heads swivelled as they made an entrance and were ushered to the table and there was a flutter of applause, gracefully acknowledged by Sir Lionel. He was a charming dinner companion and an attractive man, in spite of being old enough to be her father – actually, almost her grandfather. He was seriously considering her, he told her, laying a hand softly on hers, for the part of Gwendolen in
The Importance of Being Earnest
, but, first, he'd like to hear her read a passage or two.

The reading took place in his nearby flat where the walls were hung with framed photographs of famous actors and actresses, and a great many of Sir Lionel himself in his younger days as Romeo, Hamlet, Laertes, Henry V, Oberon, Petruchio . . . She dutifully admired the broodingly handsome looks, the chiselled lips, the perfect left profile, the thick, dark hair, well aware of what was coming. As her mother had explained long ago, sleeping with people who had influence in the theatre was the necessary price of getting good parts. She'd already had several unpleasant experiences – one, especially, that she preferred to forget – but luckily Sir Lionel was as charming in bed as he was out of it. He gave her a pair of very nice silver
earrings and the part of Gwendolen, opposite the flat-footed Paul as Jack. The local newspaper critic praised her performance.
A fresh and exciting new talent . . . I hope we see more of Rosalind Flynn – next time in the West End?
Nadine, who had played Cecily beneath several layers of make-up, wasn't mentioned at all.