Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  The air was thick with reproach. I was told how rude I was, how indifferent to fine cooking, and how lucky my lot was compared with that of the starving millions of children all over the world. So every high-day and holiday, and many a Sunday, was a hell from which I longed to escape.

  My stomach still turns as I remember the moment when the family prepared to sit at the table. My grandfather sharpens the carving knife and cuts the portions. Uncle Bill is ebullient and cheerful; Uncle Ted, watchful and wary. My father is talking to my grandfather about politics and the perfidy of management, while Uncle Hugh spreads tomato sauce on his goo. Meanwhile the women are tight-lipped and silent in their disapproval: the men, as usual, have been late back. The air is full of beer – and I am wishing that the floor would open and swallow me.

  This nausea extended to school: I was unable to eat school meals until my early teens. I simply gagged on them. I have no memories of public holidays at twenty-four Avenue Approach because we were never there. I had no cousins or friends to play with at my grandmother’s. What did I do on those endless days when the crisis of dinner had been lived through? I looked through the few books that my grandfather possessed. There was a shortened version of Alice in Wonderland – but with terrifying illustrations. All his books seemed to have terrifying illustrations – engravings that belonged to an old and forbidding age, like the ruins of Bury St Edmunds Abbey that always threatened me.

  I looked through the books, banged on the piano, and drew trains. My grandfather had quantities of lining paper from his days as a decorator. These were cut into long, seemingly endless strips, about eight inches wide. I would draw a steam engine at the start of the strip and then go on, adding truck after truck, van after van, until I reached the end of the paper. Sometimes the drawings were quite detailed. Goods trains, express trains, passenger trains, royal trains. They were always the LNER – the London North Eastern Railway, my father’s company – with apple-green locomotives and teak coaches. This was the company of the Flying Scotsman and of Mallard, the handsome 1930s Art Deco engine which held the record for the fastest speed for steam. My father was proud of his company, but ambivalent about it. He longed, as a good union man and a supporter of the Labour Party, to see the railways nationalised. I remember his jubilation after the war when it happened. And his subsequent bitterness as pride and competitiveness amongst railway men all but vanished, and standards and investment declined.

  Even so, he was a natural socialist, and remained so all his life. He was gently radical, a caring man who distrusted the ravages that a market economy regularly produces. He believed in the rights of the worker, but never trusted rules, dogmas, managers, or politicians of any party. He was a staunch trade union man until the Winter of Discontent in 1978. He then developed as much scepticism about the unions as he had naturally about every other institution. His scepticism, though, was always understated, wrung out of him reluctantly.

  I once heard him protest vehemently at union behaviour. This was in the Seventies, in my early years running the National Theatre. There was an agonisingly long unofficial strike by the stage-hands. The union had no control of its more extreme members and was clearly frightened of them. It tried to preserve its position by not recognising the strike, but placated the militants by declaring the picket official. The theatre was therefore ringed by an official picket in support of an unofficial strike. The hope was that the actors would not cross the picket lines. Fortunately the actors ignored this absurd Alice-in-Wonderland situation and went on playing. My father was furious with the union’s hypocrisy and angry that a minority could strike unofficially. ‘They’re bringing the whole Labour movement into disrepute,’ he cried. ‘The strike is unofficial so sack the lot of them.’ I told him that Jim Callaghan’s Britain had different principles from his.

  Chapter Four

  At the age of five, my cosy, mother-filled existence was seriously disrupted. I was sent to the kindergarten just up the road – a mixed-sex establishment that was an appendage to the local, rather grand, East Anglian School for Girls. My parents believed (or at least my mother did, for she repeated it often) that what mattered in education was a good start. I cannot imagine how my parents afforded to send me to this school. They must have deprived themselves of all but the bare essentials.

  I quickly liked school: the stories, the challenges, the competitiveness. And while I never much enjoyed the sports or the gym, I loved the percussion band. Anything to do with performing captivated me. I went to the theatre first when I was four. I saw Robinson Crusoe at the Playhouse, scene of my father’s amateur operatic triumph. I was captivated by the darkness of the auditorium, the smell of the crowd, the music. It was a very erotic experience. I was particularly excited by all the blacked-up people in grass skirts.

  Soon after I started kindergarten, a travelling puppet theatre visited the school and performed an entire Sleeping Beauty with string puppets, delicate sets, special lights, and a curtain that went up and down. I was transported and decided there and then to be a puppeteer when I grew up. That performance, and appearing as the ‘Spider’ in a dramatisation of Little Miss Muffet, set me on course. My costume was elaborate – made out of wire by my father and lovingly covered in black crepe paper by my mother. I was already addicted to making fantasies.

  As I came to the end of my two happy years at kindergarten, we suddenly moved. My father had been promoted. He became a stationmaster, fifth class, at Barnham – a small railway station between Bury St Edmunds and Thetford. To us sophisticated townees (for that is how we saw ourselves) to go from Bury to Barnham was stepping back into the wilderness. The idea of living there raised wails of protest from my mother and from me. But my father, although proudly unambitious, insisted on being his own boss. He wanted to go to Barnham, so we went. And at Barnham, he came into his kingdom. It was a single-line railway station with a signal box and one goods siding. There were four passenger trains a day, two each way; and a goods train at noon. My father reigned over all this, wearing a gold-braided cap inscribed ‘Station Master’. He had a staff of three – a signalman, a junior clerk, and an odd-job man. They were quickly very fond of him.

  Our house was part of the station itself. It had two rooms downstairs, one a kitchen, and two bedrooms and a box room upstairs. There was an outside loo, no bathroom, and no gas, electricity or running water. The water pump outside froze regularly in winter, and we lived and breathed oil from the oil lamps. Our wireless was powered by large chemical batteries that were taken to the village each week to be charged. My father listened compulsively to the news; it was a passion of his. He chose his newspaper with care; first the Daily Herald, then later the News Chronicle. Finally, to my surprise, when I was in my early teens, he changed to the Daily Telegraph. When I questioned him about this, he observed that all newspapers were prejudiced and had no compunction about telling lies. The Daily Telegraph was no different except that it was so immoderately and invariably right-wing that he knew where he was. He also thought its news coverage was thorough.

  Barnham was a very cold place. It was set just where the huge west Suffolk skies and tiny villages give place to the exotic brecklands of Norfolk, full of fern and pinewood and crying birds. The brecklands were like a jungle to me. I would not have been surprised to see a lion looking through the undergrowth. I collected birds’ eggs and set them in labelled compartments in a crudely carpentered box. I climbed trees to look in the nests and learned to detect a cuckoo’s egg – always a perfect match to the blue of thrush or green and beige of blackbird. It matched, but it was ominously too large. The mother bird would be reassured by the colour but not, curiously, worried by the size. I once saw a hatched-out cuckoo in a nest: a big triumphant bird with a hollow in its back. It had heaved out all the other young and they had smashed to death on the ground.

  I fell in love with the huge spaces of Suffolk. It was an idyll full of violence and blood. I watched my mother skin a rabbit or yank the insides of a chicken out with
her bare hands. Blood and offal and horse manure (always so good for the garden) were part of my everyday life. Understanding and accepting the violence of nature was, said my father, necessary ‘if you were to be a man’.

  At harvest time, we went gleaning. We picked up the ears of grain the binder had left in the fields so that we would feed them to our chickens through the autumn. All the village would be out: it was a party. The binder went round and round, and the square of corn in the centre became smaller and smaller as the sheaves were stacked up. Finally, there was a patch of wheat only some thirty feet square. All the living things of the field – the rabbits, the voles, the hares, the fieldmice – had taken refuge in it. We gathered round, the men with guns trained. At a signal, stones were thrown into the wheat and the first rabbit broke cover. The other animals, panic-stricken, followed. The air was filled with shots and shouts. The rabbits and hares hijacked into the air as the shots pierced them. The village cheered.

  My father loved Barnham. We were still poor, but we managed. And he didn’t have to work hard. He met each infrequent train and checked its arrival and departure with his large pocket watch. He dug his garden, saw to the flowerbeds on the station platform, tended his vegetables, talked to the farmers, and happily received tribute of game or rabbit from the local landowners. The Duke of Grafton’s estate was the biggest in our area; his name was spoken with awe.

  The crisis in my education had been solved in a way that I still do not quite understand. It was assumed that I would be condemned to the village school. But my father had been a pupil at the Bury St Edmunds Secondary School for Boys. He still knew the headmaster and, I suppose, pulled some strings. After an interview and a test, it was agreed that, although I was only seven, I could join the class of ten-year-olds, commuting the five or six miles to Bury each day. I went on the train, in the charge of some older pupils. There were leather straps on the windows and brass catches on the doors. And the upholstery, even on this meagre little railway line, far outshone the furniture I was used to at home. I felt very privileged. There was a bookstall among the boxes of fish on the platform of Bury St Edmunds station. I hoarded my pocket money and bought comics.

  I was made to feel special at home. But there was a disadvantage: any injury or illness, however slight, was seen as a disaster. So by the time I was six or seven, I was intellectually adventurous but physically timid. The school was tough, the boys big and boisterous; I was small and vulnerable, and also intelligent beyond my years. I was by far the youngest in the school – an oddity, an outsider. But being different did not make me feel unhappy. I had started to feel rather clever – though I didn’t tell anybody.

  My parents made me understand that learning was the one certain way to betterment. I was always allowed time to read and to listen to music on the radio, and was encouraged to ask questions. My mother would lament that she had left school early. She believed in books; but I never saw her read one. Housework gave her no time, she said. She was a terrible organiser, flitting constantly from one task to another. She was forever tired, forever worried, forever flustered. She scurried through life like an anxious hen. Our house was in a continuous state of chronic yet homely untidiness. There were odd bits and pieces of furniture, odd leavings of materials and ornaments passed on to us or picked up. ‘I can never sit down for a minute,’ she would say. ‘If only I could get the weight off my feet.’ I was expected to help by running errands, going to the general stores or (when we moved to Cambridge) to the fish and chip shop. If I had no homework I occasionally dried the washing-up or shelled the peas. But men in our family did not help with the housework. It was not expected. They dug the garden, laid the fires and filled the oil lamps, but that was all. Reading a book let me off many a session of washing-up; but it had to be ‘serious’. Comics would not do.

  Chapter Five

  Barnham was a paradise for a small boy. My friend and mentor was Charlie Kent, the gamekeeper. He was old to the eyes of a six-year-old boy though he could barely have been fifty. He had been in the trenches in the First World War. He had no family and had never married. He lived by himself in one of a row of cottages which were reached by crossing the station yard and jumping a stream. His garden seemed always to be full of blooms – sweetpeas and roses and irises. Everything gleamed and shone in his cottage, polished like the toes of his splendid gamekeeper’s boots. He was precise, though not in the least prissy.

  He had three spaniels, brown and white with soft warm muzzles. They were great friends to a small boy. I grew up with dogs, and have tried to keep them later in life. For ten years at Stratford, in the Sixties, I had an Old English sheepdog named Simpkin (after an Elizabethan clown); and on my fortieth birthday, my children gave me a beautiful St Bernard puppy, who during his short life seemed to eat half a horse a day. He died of heart failure at ten months, his frame too big for the heart that sustained it – apparently a common failing in this huge breed. I have had no more dogs.

  Charlie Kent was a man of few words – which is perhaps why I cannot remember his voice. I trailed behind him as he tramped round the Duke of Grafton’s estate, both of us looking out for poachers or snared rodents. He tended the chick pheasants as they hatched out from under their foster hen. He always wore a flat cap, a greenish herring-bone jacket and jodhpurs with brown leather gaiters. He was reserved and respectful to his bosses and his betters; but there was a twinkle in the eyes above his tiny sandy moustache. He gave me many rare pieces of information. I remember particularly the story of a bird seldom seen – the red-backed shrike. Charlie showed unusual excitement when we found evidence of it in a thorn bush. The nest was surrounded with a fearsome quantity of thorns and on each was a little blood-soaked mess.

  Charlie explained that this was the ‘larder’ the mother had prepared for her offspring. She had placed flies, grubs and pieces of worm on the spikes and would later take them off to feed her young. When they got a little larger they would lean out of the nest and select juicy morsels for themselves. It seemed to me logical; better than a poor mother bird working her wings off to feed a monstrous baby cuckoo.

  Long after I left Barnham, I heard that Charlie had been dismissed. He was old and ill, and died soon after. He received nothing for his lifetime of devoted work except his pension from the state. This wouldn’t have surprised him. He expected nothing from the masters. ‘There’s “us” and there’s “them”,’ he would say, ‘and that’s all there is to it.’

  In 1970, I made a film based on Ronald Blythe’s book, Akenfield, a portrait of a Suffolk village before and after two World Wars. The film was very near to my heart and one of the most directly personal things I have ever done. The characters in it were played by real people – local Suffolk people – improvising from their experiences and their knowledge of the place. I could hear my grandfather talking. I spent nearly a year on Akenfield; it took me back to Barnham and to Charlie Kent.

  As well as the countryside, there was the station: another new world. I don’t remember any school friends, but there were long hours spent in the signal box with the signalman. It was always overheated and had a huge stove merrily burning LNER coal. An impenetrable fug rose from the signalman’s pipe. The cabin had a dozen white, black and red metal levers standing upright. By tugging on one of these you could, with a mighty effort, shift the points or alter the signals. Each ticking telegraph monitor had a wooden handle that could be wiggled to and fro to send information to the neighbouring stations on the whereabouts of trains.

  Trains then were steam trains. I still love them. They are fearsome, powerful and noisy, but somehow alive and unpredictable. A diesel engine keeps its power to itself, throbbing anonymously. But the old steam engines were proud of flaunting their power and seemed to have individual personalities. Even the little tank engines that served my father’s station were noisy and particular. I was allowed in the driver’s cabin, a rattling place of heat and smells. I was excited by the roar of the fire as the fireman piled on the coals. Ea
ch noon in the school holidays, I would ride on the tank engine as it shunted the goods trucks. I sang George Formby songs and played my ukelele.

  I was given this ukelele one sea-side holiday. We had a week at St Leonards, made possible by my father’s free travel as a railway man. We sat one morning in a large hall at the end of the pier. A band was playing – in my memory a huge Glenn Miller-like assembly, but probably some four or five musicians. There was community singing. The band leader, seeing this seven-year-old singing lustily, invited me up on stage to do a solo. I found myself singing into a large square microphone, lowered to match my height. I heard my own voice as the sea crashed outside. I was aware of many smiling faces, full of attention and approval as I sang.

  Red sails in the sunset

  Way over the sea

  Oh carry my loved one

  Home safely to me

  The applause was tremendous. Or so it seemed to me.