by Jonathan Coe
I wish I had a picture of one of those picnics. I would like to look on our faces again, me and Beatrix, together, somewhere on those hills. But this picture of the kitchen, dreary though it is, tells more of the story. And it is appropriate, too, to dwell on the infant figure of Thea, your mother, as she lies in her pram, unaware of the turns her narrative is about to take, unaware that the fragile sense of security she has enjoyed in her short life up until this point is already on the verge of splintering for ever into fragments. How peaceful she looks, in her baby ignorance!
The eighth picture is quite different from those that I’ve chosen before. It was not taken by me, or Beatrix, or any member of our family. It was given to me, in fact, following a dinner party in London when I was well into my fifties. It features a caravan – another caravan! I am only just beginning to realize what an important part caravans play in this story. There will be other ones, too, before I am finished. But this particular caravan is rather special, and so are the two people standing in front of it. They are both actors. One of them is called Jennifer Jones, and the other is called David Farrar. I suppose it is just possible that you might have heard of them.
Where to begin? Ruth, the friend with whom I shared a good many years of my life, was a gregarious person and liked to entertain regularly. She was a painter – rather a highly regarded painter, at this time (by which I mean the late 1980s) – and the people we had to dinner were often people of similar leanings and temperament: fellow artists, writers, musicians, critics and so on. One evening we had among our guests a man who wrote what I always thought were fearsomely intellectual books about the cinema. He was not very good company, I have to say, although that is completely by the by.
The talk turned to films at one point, and our cinephile guest mentioned the director Michael Powell and his film Gone To Earth. He did so because he had heard that it was about to be revived at a London cinema. This was the first part of the conversation that had attracted my attention, because until then I’m afraid that it had (like most conversations about films) been boring me, and I had started to doze off. It was only when this title was brought up that I suddenly turned and addressed a question to him. ‘But surely nobody remembers that film?’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard it mentioned for years and years.’ He told me that, on the contrary, the reputation of Michael Powell had been in the ascendant recently, and that this film was now regarded – by some (he stressed that word most emphatically) – as a masterpiece. ‘You’ve seen it yourself, have you?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I saw it in Birmingham – several times, as a matter of fact – in the winter of 1950. But never since.’ ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ said our writer friend, and then launched into a brief précis of the film’s disastrous fate: the producer had loathed it, apparently, and given orders for it to be reshot, re-edited, retitled and generally hacked about for its American release. In the years that followed, all traces of the original were believed to have disappeared. I was astonished to learn that it had now been restored to its former state and could soon be seen for the price of a cinema ticket and a tube journey to Oxford Street. ‘But Ruth, we have to go,’ I insisted, turning to her. ‘We have to go and see it as soon as possible.’ ‘Of course, if you wish,’ she answered, indifferently. ‘But why is it so important? What’s so special about it?’ ‘I would guess,’ said our friend, ‘that Rosamond must have seen it at an impressionable age, and it marked her for life.’ To which I replied: ‘Not exactly. I was at an impressionable age, yes, but not when I saw it. I’m talking about the time I was in it.’
Two days after this conversation, he sent me a photograph – a lobby card from the film, which he had retrieved from his personal collection. This is the photograph I have in front of me now. I shall describe it to you in a moment. But first of all I shall have to give you some background.
It was in a letter, written in June 1949, that Beatrix told me the astonishing news: a film crew was coming to Much Wenlock. A real film crew, making a real feature film for the cinemas, with real British and American stars. Yes – American! Because the star of the film – and this was the really unbelievable thing, for me – was going to be Jennifer Jones, who only a couple of years earlier had reduced me to a state of slack-jawed astonishment with her performance in some Western (the title will come back to me shortly) in which she played opposite Gregory Peck and flaunted a brazen, swaggering sexual energy, the like of which I had never seen or imagined before. Ah, yes, I remember now – it was called Duel in the Sun, and I think my parents regretted taking me to see it from the moment the credits rolled. We saw it at the old Gaumont cinema in Birmingham, and I suppose I would have been about thirteen or fourteen years old. My first real crush, it would be true to say, was on Jennifer Jones. Gregory Peck left me completely cold. Afterwards I used some of my pocket money to buy a copy of Picturegoer magazine which contained an article about the film. It made great play of the fact that Miss Jones (or Mrs David O. Selznick, as she had become by then) had first won fame playing a nun or some such virginal role, and yet now here she was portraying a sleazy tramp of the Old West, and the headline on the article was ‘From Saint to Sinner in Under Two Years!’ Funny how some things stick in the memory. Alongside the article were some pictures of Jennifer Jones in her provocative lacy costumes, her dense black hair centre-parted, bee-stung lips frozen into a pout and vixen eyes always looking slightly aslant, away from the camera. Of course I cut the pictures out and slept with them tucked furtively under my pillow, but I never told anybody about my obsession – not even Beatrix, when I wrote her one of my weekly, gushing confessional letters. I felt somehow ashamed, embarrassed by the intensity of it. And at the back of my mind, I’m sure, was the guilty suspicion that it should have been Gregory Peck I was getting excited about.
Two years later – with the pictures still in my possession, crumpled and faded, although no longer kept under my pillow – Beatrix’s letter arrived, and I had to read it through many times before it made any sense to me. You have to consider my situation, Imogen: a lonely girl living in suburban Birmingham, with few close schoolfriends, practically an only child (for Sylvia, although still living with us, was now twenty-five years old and did not feel like a sister at all); it’s hard to conceive of anything more remote from the world that these pictures evoked. Sensuality; glamour; the unimaginable lives lived by those godlike figures thousands of miles away in Hollywood. The idea that this world might suddenly be within reach, its crazy, unpredictable orbit bringing it, unbelievably, to rest for a few weeks in Much Wenlock of all places, was more than my childish brain could take in at first. I remember running downstairs after I had read the letter for the third or fourth time and screaming something at my mother, some hysterical, babbling attempt at conveying Beatrix’s news, and being met with an incredulous dismissal: ‘Oh, don’t be foolish, dear’ – some such words – ‘Bea must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’ But she hadn’t; that was the amazing thing. It was all about to come true.
The next thing was to beg, persuade and implore my parents to let me visit Beatrix while the filming was taking place. By a great stroke of good fortune it was scheduled to start in August, during the school holidays. My mother and father had been planning to take me camping for a week, near Rhyl in North Wales, but I was already dreading it. (Can you imagine what the thought of it must have seemed like, to a sixteen-year-old girl?) Anyway, it was not difficult to dissuade them. It was agreed that I should go to stay with Beatrix and Roger instead, so I had the delicious prospect of a whole week in Much Wenlock to look forward to, while the filming was in full flow.
In the meantime I found out everything I could about the forthcoming production – which was next to nothing. I went to my local library and could find no references to it at all in the current newspapers or magazines. The best I could do was to borrow a copy of the novel upon which the film, apparently, was to be based. I devoured it in a couple of sittings and then reread it and then reread i
t again. I have not read it since, I must admit: my taste for that sort of overheated rustic melodrama has abated somewhat. At the time I thought it entrancing. It’s the story of an ignorant country girl who marries the village chaplain but meanwhile gets caught up in a torrid affair with the local squire, while quite sensibly preferring her pet fox to either of them. At the climax she comes to a sticky end by falling down a mineshaft. I suppose that now most people would consider it silly stuff, but at the time I loved it, for being rooted in the Shropshire landscape, saturated with the colours and contours of its hills, and the author’s feeling for nature is still what I remember best. There were some beautiful passages.
Anyway, all of that – like so much else – is neither here nor there. In July there was a letter from Beatrix which contained all sorts of exciting news. Some members of the crew were already starting to arrive, including the actor who was going to play the squire. His name was David Farrar, and Beatrix didn’t really know who he was, but one of her friends had seen him once in a film about nuns (another one: nuns were very popular in those days, cinematically speaking) and thought he was really ‘dishy’ (I believe that was the word), and then just the week before, when she – this friend – had been cycling along the road to Wellington, she had seen him coming down the same road in the opposite direction, riding a horse! She had almost fallen off her bicycle with the shock. Another thing Beatrix told me was that a notice had gone up in the market hall at Much Wenlock, saying that they needed all sorts of help with the film: they needed craftsmen and carpenters to help build the sets, and they needed good riders to be in the hunting scenes, and they needed lots of extras just to come along and be in some of the street scenes, and anyone could come and take part so long as they were able to bring their own costumes, which should be at least fifty or sixty years old. And Beatrix told me that upstairs at Warden Farm, somewhere in one of the attics, there were all these trunks and chests full of clothes that had belonged to Ivy’s mother, Agatha, and she was going to go over and look through them and find some dresses that were suitable for both of us to wear, if she could.
Roger himself professed no interest in any of these doings. He gave us to understand that it was all so much female frippery, in his opinion. I thought this rather odd at first – he was not by any means immune to glamour, after all – until Beatrix informed me that her husband was already quite preoccupied, being fully absorbed in an affair with a neighbour who lived two or three doors down the road from their house. She was a very pretty half-Italian woman called Annamaria, who had annoyed Beatrix considerably a few weeks earlier by being chosen as ‘Carnival Queen’ of Much Wenlock, pipping her to the post by only a handful of votes. Beatrix hated her with a passion, there is no doubt about it, and she hated Roger for his betrayal, too, but she did not act as she did by way of retaliation, I don’t think. What happened that summer could have been predicted from the start. It had a kind of grand inevitabilty about it.
I can describe exactly the clothes that Beatrix found for us to wear for our appearance in the film. This is not a feat of memory on my part: it’s because I have the film on tape now, recorded from the television some years ago, and she and I can be seen quite clearly in one of the earliest scenes. Oh, the excitement, of glimpsing myself – just for a few seconds – on the big screen, when I saw the film with my parents when it was first released! We went and saw it four or five times in a single week, just for that thrill. (And most of the time we were almost alone in the cinema, for it was not a popular film, not popular at all.) And then the poignancy of glimpsing myself – of glimpsing both of us – once again, when the film was rereleased almost forty years later, and I saw it with Ruth at that cinema near Oxford Street shortly after our dinner party. She, I must say, was not in the least happy about this. A few years earlier (I will explain all of this in due course) she had made me promise to forget about Beatrix: not to write to her, and not to talk about her. So it was quite a concession, on Ruth’s part, to come and see the film with me, but we barely spoke about it afterwards; and when it was shown on television some time later, I did not tell her that I had recorded it, and I did not watch the tape until after her death. Since then I have seen it many times – so many times; it is the only moving record I have of Beatrix at all, the only one where she is not frozen in time. It is precious to me for that reason, mainly, although there are other reasons too.
Our little appearance takes place in what I believe the film-makers call an establishing shot. A sculptor is seen chiselling the date – 20 June 1897 – on to a memorial stone, against a background of bright blue sky. Behind this, already, we can hear the noise of horses’ hooves clip-clopping along the street. We then cut to the street itself – the bottom of the High Street, at its junction with Wilmore Street, so that the old Tudor guildhall and buttermarket buildings are also in view – and there, immediately, you can see Beatrix and me, standing in the left-hand corner of the frame, laughing and talking together. She is wearing a sailor suit with three-quarter sleeves. The blouse of the suit is Cambridge blue, but her skirts are darker, and pleated. She has a bow at her breast, and the collar of the suit is edged with white braid. On her head she wears a straw boater, I suppose to complete the nautical theme. For some reason she also has a length of skipping rope twined around her hands. I think she is meant to look like a youngish girl, although of course Beatrix was nineteen years old by now. Her hair is the same strawberry blonde as her mother’s, and is tied back behind the neck. Her pale skin looks slightly pinkened; she never tanned, but always went pink, and that hot summer she had already been spending too much time out in the sun. I am also wearing a straw hat – a large, round, wide-brimmed pink hat with a single ribbon tied around it – and a red checked pinafore over a high-necked white dress. The dress’s ruffle peeks out beneath the pinafore at my legs. My hair is longer than Beatrix’s, much longer: it reaches almost down to my waist in two thin, wiry strands. I had forgotten that I used to wear my hair so long, in those days. I have worn it short now for more than fifty years. I am also wearing a pair of white cotton gloves, which seems a peculiar touch, for a scene which is meant to be taking place on a bright summer’s day. These come into view after a few seconds, when I brush my hair back in a rather awkward gesture. (I appear to be much more self-conscious in front of the camera than Beatrix, who looks entirely at ease there.) A few yards behind us, a pony and trap crosses the screen from right to left, and a bewhiskered policeman stands directing the traffic. After the pony and trap, a man and a woman stroll across in the same direction: he in a grey bowler and dark grey suit, she in a full-length gown, chestnut-brown, and carrying a lacy parasol, unopened. Two schoolboys stand in the very foreground, just their heads and shoulders visible, with straw boaters and Eton collars. Behind them, the street is busy with more costumed extras, browsing at the market stalls, promenading up and down the street. The impression taken away by any casual viewer of the film, from these few brief seconds, would be of a generalized bustle and activity; the two girls in the bottom left-hand corner would attract no special attention, I suppose. But I have watched and rewatched that fragment of videotape, until the tape itself has grown worn-out and jittery, looking for meaning in those thoughtless gestures, the smiles we exchange, the raising of my hand, the turn of Beatrix’s head as she looks away and smiles into the distance, restless, independent. Perhaps it is wrong to look for meaning in such things. Perhaps the meanings we find that way are treacherous and false, like the wind in which my hair seems to wave, which was not a real wind at all, but came from a huge machine set up about fifty yards away, powered by cables which coiled and trailed around the street like a nest of snakes.