by D. D. Mayers
The Tutor
Looking back on my life, from where I am at this moment, sitting on a luxurious balcony, in a five-star hotel, looking out through countless coconut palms to the Indian Ocean, with white foam waves crashing on to a golden beach in Kerala, Southern India. At the age of seventy, it’s very difficult to analyse how events have come about to enable this to happen.
I’ve explained earlier how I was suddenly released from having to return to my so-called ‘educational establishment’, with such ease, with a throw-away line to my mother. I was left dumbfounded. The sense of elation didn’t hit me till much later. I can remember that feeling of excitement welling up from the pit of my stomach and bursting into my solar plexus, to this very day. It doesn’t happen very often and, unfortunately, is quickly dulled by the reality of oncoming events. What I really wanted most of all was to stay at home, live at home, work at home, work with my father, work on the ranch. If only I could have vocalised that wish then. I didn’t, I let events take control of me, rather than the other way round. Chances present themselves, to most people, regularly, but it’s only the entrepreneurial spirit that recognises them. I let myself be swept along by events I no longer wanted to be part of. I couldn’t say I didn’t need any further education because on paper I plainly did, but I wanted to get on living a life I knew I loved and understood. Instead, I was sent away, again, for further education.
There followed an extraordinarily strange, surreal year of being taught by a man who was so ‘different’ from anyone I’ve ever met before or since, I can’t really categorise him. There were only four of us who lived with him and his wife, in his home, an old vicarage, for that year, but he took it upon himself to teach us everything. When I say ‘everything’, I really do mean ‘everything’. Not just to pass exams, in all subjects, but even how to dress in different situations. Every evening we ‘dressed’ for supper and we had to make interesting conversation. We weren’t allowed to ask for the pepper or salt, we had to be offered it, and we had to know which wine to drink with which food. He gave the two of us, as we were slightly older than the other two, a glass of wine he and his wife were drinking. He talked about it, in ‘wine speak’, where it came from, the type of wine it was, everything you should know about wine if you like to drink it. He would test us the following evening. We then had to compare it to the present evening’s bottle. After supper, we’d troop through the cold hall, to his library to be given an ‘English spelling’ test. We then chose a book to read quietly before being sent to bed. We slept and did our schoolwork in the same room. Every morning before getting dressed, however cold it was, only wearing pyjama bottoms, we’d shiver our way downstairs to the hall, through the kitchen, to the scullery. There, next to the door leading to the yard, was an old, even for then, long-handled water pump. This drew, after frantic priming and pumping, freezing cold clear water, from the well below, half filling a square butler’s sink. The enormously fat gardener-cum-general-factotum was ordered to watch over us having this agonising, thorough wash. Watching us wail in agony, always made his revolting, swollen, close to bursting belly, wobble with mirth.
You would have thought our Tutor, with the rigid attention to detail he’d taken upon himself to distil education into us, would have liked us, or at least had some regard for us. Actually, I think he half hated us. He would, quite suddenly, fly into ferocious, bellowing tempers at any one of us. His face would swell purple with rage, his wide staring eyes, one of which was glass, looked as though they were about to pop out of his head. He’d bellow, at any one of us, ‘go to bed’, in the middle of any class; obviously we hadn’t had enough sleep to be so stupid. He’d get so angry he’d have to storm from the room.
At the weekends, we weren’t allowed to stay in our room and footle about being bored, as most teenagers. We had to do something with a purpose. It could be anything, but there had to be a purpose. The local landowner, had a large area of woodland nearby, with a picture-perfect river wending its way through the middle. It would form smallish pools then continue to squeeze its way through large boulders and rocks and waterfalls to the next pool. We were allowed to fish the pools, and we were allowed to make small fires to grill our fish. Catching fish couldn’t be relied upon, so we were given small loaves of bread and cheese, or pieces of steak to cook over our fires, or other titbits his wife had over in the pantry. In the telling, it all sounds rather ideal, but somehow it wasn’t. Everything was a test, and we had to pass the test, with his unnamed rules, in exactly the same way as if it were a written exam. So a failure might well provoke a torrent of derision which could work itself into a full-blown explosion of purple-faced fury. His expectations were far beyond everyday reality. He wanted us to be his ‘Famous Five’, all day, every day, it was very wearying. I now can understand how disappointed he must have been, but he was working with the wrong people, we were there because we’d failed elsewhere.
***
The day we were waiting for, the day we were working towards, the primary reason we were there, finally arrived. The local vicar was booked to invigilate. We were taking Maths, English, History and Geography. Early that morning, before six, he burst into our room, shouting, ‘Get up, get up, wake those stupid, inert brains of yours,’ then stormed out. No sooner than we were struggling to wake, he burst in again, ‘Come on, come on, what do you think you’re doing.’ he was winding himself up into a shouting fury, ‘Don’t you know what day this is, get washed, have breakfast, come on, come on.’ We were sitting waiting at our table in the middle of the room, ages before the vicar was due to arrive. ‘Don’t just sit there, do something.’ He was so nervous, he couldn’t stay still. Maths was first, it wasn’t too difficult. The Vicar quietly sat there reading, so unlike our ‘tutor’. I don’t know what to call him really, ‘our keeper’, ‘our headmaster’. He could be heard pacing about down stairs, around the sitting room, through the hall, into his study, in and out of the library, into the garden, slamming the patio doors, he was a caged tiger. At the end of the allocated time the vicar quietly said, ‘Please stop writing’, and collected our work. This was the cue for our caged tiger to burst in, grab one of the papers and immediately go through the whole thing question by question. ‘Oh no, you didn’t, you brainless idiot.’ No praise for correct answers, just a grunt, ‘About time too.’ This whole routine was replicated for every subject. He must have been exhausted, but as I said when I started to relate this episode in my life, he was a very ‘different’ man.
Anyway, the year, eventually, wound its expensive way to a satisfactory conclusion. With all exams passed, maybe not with flying colours, but acceptable enough to allow me back to where I always wanted to be in the first place, In my beautiful home in the Kedong Valley, on the cattle ranch, working for my father.
I’d started my schooling at the age of six and I’d now finished at the age of nineteen. Thirteen years. Thirteen long, long years. Did I really learn anything of any use for ‘this’? This is where my heart was, my being, my soul. I was complete here. Even though I knew this is where I should be, I never expressed it in those terms. I knew my father would have done anything I asked of him, but I never put it to him like that. I also knew he didn’t really believe farming was a viable way of life. He wasn’t ‘a farmer’, he was a businessman who farmed. It would never have occurred to him he was building something for the future, something to ‘hand on’ to his sons. If he could have sold everything for an enormous profit, he would have done so.
London
I found myself back in London, no particular place in London, just ‘in London’. I wandered the streets of London. I distinctly remember coming up from the ‘underground’ at Piccadilly Circus, spat out from a hole in the ground, into a teeming mass of people. A moving crowd, I was part of the whole crowd, but not knowing a single person, I was completely alone. I might as well have been in the middle of the Sahara Desert. I moved about unseen, I could do anything, and yet I could do
nothing. I had nothing. Why was I here with nothing? In the middle of this teeming mass of humanity, completely alone. I had a loving family, I had a beautiful home and yet I was here with nothing.
I bought the Evening Standard newspaper. I found a room in Nothing Hill Gate for £2 10 shillings a week. It was a brown room, up four flights of brown stairs, in a brown house, owned by a thin, old, bent stick of a landlady. She had iron grey hair pulled tightly back into a bun and wore the same faded floral apron all the time I was there. At the end of each week I padded down the brown stairs into a half-lit brown basement and knocked at a brown door. I paid my faded, bent, little old stick of a landlady, her rent. I could hardly distinguish her from her surroundings. Her tight sallow, parchment cheeks, slowly pulled back her thin lips into a half smile and she said softly, ‘Thank you.’
My grandfather was a very, very wealthy, self-made Australian, who built the first sugar refinery in ‘Black Africa’. I never met him, and my father never referred to him in any way. My father’s nickname, to his seven brothers and four sisters, was Squib. Although he never so much as raised his voice to us, his close family, I had cause to witness his explosive temper on some occasions. I think his temper had a lot to do with the relationship he had with his father.
Later, my father had asked Lord Lyle, of Tate and Lyle, to give his son a job, in the head offices of Tate and Lyle, in the city of London. The order to employ me had filtered down from on-high to the manager of lump sugar sales. I was welcomed with open arms, the prodigal son. I was given my own desk, £10 a week and an account at Lloyds bank in the city. I had ‘made it. Well, perhaps I might have ‘made it’ had I ever discovered what on earth I was supposed to do at my beautiful desk, with its green leather top, drawers each side, and my own telephone. There were nine other desks in the room, with a row of four busy tapping secretaries at the front. Everyone was so industrious, If they weren’t scribbling in huge manuals they were talking earnestly on their telephones, or they were walking about quickly from desk to desk. In and out of the office, speaking into dictaphones, pieces of paper flying from in-tray to out tray, the whole office thrummed. I was a fly on the wall, I can see the whole scene as clearly now as I felt it then. I was part of a machine, in the same way, I was of the crowd at Piccadilly Circus, but a spare-part waiting to be used. All the other cogs were in good working order. Lunchtime thankfully arrived. A delicious lunch was provided in a canteen for all office staff, and the managers of all departments had their own restaurant. I met a chap there who’d been working for Tate and Lyle for more than ten years and was relieved to hear he didn’t seem to know what he was doing either. He was perfectly happy with his situation and intended to go on working for the company until he retired in 35 years. Could I actually go on doing this for the next 40 years? The thought was terrifying. I persevered for eighteen months.
A few months before I handed in my gratefully received notice, by a relieved departmental manager, I’d turned desperately to the Evening Standard’s classified ads looking for anything that might catch my eye. I’d no idea what I was looking for, but suddenly a little two-liner jumped out of the page. Drama classes. Auditions held at 23 Berwick St. W1. 6pm. I knew Berwick St. was well known for its material shops, but I was yet to find out the nature of the other trade for which it was better known. I climbed the stairs up to another brown door. I knocked. The door swung back and in front of me stood, a short, fat middle-aged woman with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth and wearing a flimsy, frilly see-through nightdress. She said, in a broad cockney accent, ‘Wanna short time love?’ I didn’t then know what ‘a short-time’ was and said, ‘No I’ve come about the drama classes.’ The door slammed shut. I eventually found myself sitting opposite a pretty little, round-faced girl, with white, clear skin and large doe-like brown eyes and long dark straight brown hair. She asked me to do my audition piece. I can’t remember what I did, but with my fiver on the table I was accepted.
I didn’t know then, but do know now, this little meeting, held in such a different place to anywhere I had ever been or experienced, was to have a profound effect on the direction of my life. Not only did I find a group of open-minded friends, from such diverse backgrounds, I’d broken myself free from the chains to which I had willingly tied myself, those of my own background.
My father didn’t want me to have anything to do with farming, but I wondered what he’d think of my present choice.
There were about eight of us altogether. At first we met once a week in the back of the little material shop in Berwick Street. But we found we enjoyed each other’s company so much, we booked another room in Holborn to meet more often. The classes were taken by the little white-faced, dark-haired girl called Zoe and a Scottish actor called Jeremy Ure. Quite quickly it became apparent who could act, and who just found it liberating to mix with others of open, friendly diversity.
Surprisingly, very surprisingly, I found myself drawn to the whole notion of the theatre. Not necessarily acting in itself, but the whole thing. I’d stumbled upon something where everyone concerned had the same enthusiasm, a sense of envelopment. Only in retrospect can I equate that sense, as equivalent to belonging to my home. A warmth, satisfaction, a calmness. No one could honestly recommend it as a profession, and I can truthfully say the idea of acting at all, let alone a profession was never even a spark. But all those to whom we were introduced by Jeremy Ure and little doe-eyed Zoe, loved doing what they did.
It wasn’t long before I was given my first job. A six-month contract as an ASM, assistant stage manager, in the repertory theatre at Northampton. I received the princely sum of six pounds a week. The room in which I lodged nearby cost thirty shillings a week with use of the kitchen. That left me four pounds ten shillings for everything else. Even then a struggle. I don’t know how I managed, but I loved it.
Nairobi
When we first met, I was an actor in the small repertory theatre, called The Donovan Maule in Nairobi. I lived in theatre accommodation and my little wife-to-be shared various houses in Nairobi having been invited out to Kenya to stay with a close school friend. Just imagine if she’d known then, what was going to befall her. Even after I’d come out of that loathsome tunnel, she’s still left with a raspberry. Cockney slang, ‘raspberry ripple, cripple’.
My contract with the theatre was for a year, and the ‘Light of my Life’ was about to leave any time soon. What to do, what to do, desperate action was called for. I knew she liked the theatre and all the life around it, but my trump card was the garden. Nobody could resist the call of the garden. Every Saturday night the curtain came down at ten thirty, so we made our way out of Nairobi, about forty miles, to my magical home. The main road out of Nairobi, was tarmac, so that was usually uneventful. The magic started as soon as you turned off the main road on to the earth road, my father built, through the forest, down the side of the Great Rift Valley to the house. In our headlights, we might encounter all manner of beautiful animals. Regularly, little Diker would dart out of the undergrowth, come to a grinding halt dazzled by the headlights, wait, then gingerly take high slow steps until back to the safety of the bush on the other side. Less often, but possible any time, were Buffalo, crashing about, Waterbuck, cleverly turning away from the lights showing off their perky white bottoms, to walk down their own shadow. There were sometimes Giraffe, although what they thought they were doing in the forest away from their home on the plain among the little yellow thorn trees, God only knows. But occasionally, very occasionally, and you’d remember it forever, a leopard would be caught by the lights. On the occasions it happened, they didn’t seem to mind. They stood there, head up, neck long, full height, alert, looking about, confident. Then they’d turn away from the car, walk-on nonchalantly in front of the lights, as we followed slowly behind. On one occasion, we followed that beautiful, majestic animal for what seemed like ten minutes. At the end of this two-mile exciting drive, even if we’d seen nothing
, we’d nuzzle into the car park under the great fig tree, with its long roots hanging from its great bows. The electric light generator had stopped and the night guard was soundly asleep. My mother always left out a hurricane lantern, making an inviting warm glow over the veranda, and inside, on the dining room table, a delicious little feast. Then ‘She’ went to her room, and me to mine.
Sunday mornings were always a delight. My father was born into a rugged Australian family whose father owned thousands of acres of sugar in northern Queensland, so a sumptuous breakfast was the most important meal of the day. First, fruit from the garden, mine was always avocado pear with cream and sugar, then a Thompson’s gazelle’s liver and kidneys, and two fried eggs. Then our own bread and marmalade followed by two large cups of the most delicious coffee you can think of. It’s the first thing my father ‘got on the go’ when he came through to the dining room, in the mornings.
I don’t think My father was ever seduced by the garden in the same way I was, he liked to be out on the hot plains with his cattle and the plain’s game all around. As indeed did I. I can see now that that’s where I should have been, by his side where I always had been, before being sent away to England to be ‘educated’.
Now, to be an actor, I mean I ask you. He couldn’t really understand how that came to be. My father always came back to the garden, every evening, he knew how beautiful it was, but that was my mother’s domain. She could do anything she wanted, and she did. She always had a project on the go. My Ayah, Di-dee, who now had no more children to look after, although she still always told me to wear my hat and proper shoes, so I wouldn’t get burnt or get jiggers underneath my toenails which only she knew how to take out, now became head gardener. A position she took to like a duck to water, and held until the day she died.