A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  It was quite clear that the entire school staff had now considered my case hopeless, and to my simple, and gratified, astonishment, I was permitted to “do” these plays as long as they didn’t interfere with the boys’ working life at school.

  In fact they became so popular that I even had chairs set up for the staff who actually came and watched some of the performances, thus giving me, if not the others, a first heady whiff of an Audience. Albeit they were pretty stolid and dull, they were there. And the show became For Them. Even the Headmaster vaguely approved. What else could he do?

  My father by this time was now thoroughly disillusioned with me. I could sense it very well. He never made jokes any more and always seemed rather preoccupied and distant when I was in the same room with him. Lally, correctly, pointed out that he was “disappointed” in me, that it was entirely my own fault, I had been given every chance and warning, and that if I didn’t set to and pull up my socks I’d be in for a very unpleasant surprise one day. She also added that he had a great deal to worry him.

  He had. After eleven years my mother suddenly found, to her despair, that she was pregnant, and life shifted imperceptibly, but firmly, into a different gear. My sister and I had noticed that she seemed to be getting rather large, and had, I remember, speculated on the very improbable fact that she might be going to have a baby. But the fact was so abhorrent to us, and we considered her so terribly old anyway, that the idea slipped easily from our narrow little minds and we thought no more about it and merely decided that she was “putting on weight”.

  She settled all that easily enough one day when we were at the top of the garden picking lilac for the drawing-room.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” she said. Clearly having rehearsed it for ages.

  We showed no surprise, which might have comforted her, because she went on to say that it would be quite soon, that she hoped it would be a boy and that she thought it would because it kicked so much, and that she wanted us to be very, very kind to it and love it and not make it feel that it didn’t belong to us all and was loved and welcome.

  Later in the Nursery, where my sister now slept alone, since Lally had one day made the disconcerting discovery during Bath Time that I was “growing up”, we looked at each other with ashen faces and saw the future, correctly; hideous with crying and Nurses and a stranger in our midst whom we should have to like whether we wanted to or not. This would be no Other Child, no Outsider, but our very own; some eleven years late in joining.

  We were bleak.

  Everyone was bleak in fact. Eleven years is a long time in which to have forgotten the pattering of those blasted tiny feet. We had, we considered, all got Set In Our Ways. Well: now they were to be shifted a bit, those Ways, things were never to be quite the same again. A new phase was about to start. We all wondered, privately, how we should manage.

  July 1934 was blazing. Roses opened and fell within the day, and the lawns turned rusty beige. My sister was dispatched to our grandmother in Scotland for a while so that her room, the Nursery, could become one again; this time for the Baby. I was allowed to remain at home to welcome this addition. I was, it was pointed out, the eldest and it was right and proper that I should be present in the house when he arrived. The Nursery was stripped out and painted white. A cot and armchair and small table, scales and a bath with ducks on it took the place of our battered toy boxes, book cases and a gabled dolls’ house. Then came Nurse Hennessy, a broad, hefty Irish Nurse who crackled like a twig fire and was less friendly.

  Lally refused to carry trays up to the Nursery until the Baby was actually born, and so a small, but deep, rift started in the family life. However, Nurse Hennessy seemed not to care and swigged down her Guinness with her lunch as cheerfully as if she had been sitting in her own Nursery sipping champagne, which, she assured us, was what she had been Accustomed to at her Other Places. Lally sipped away at her tea in the kitchen, at her table, and read Poppies Weekly slowly from cover to cover without saying a word. I ate with them, my mother, by this time, spending most of the day in her room lying down and feeling wretched. My father was “at The Times” and I just sensed that someone had turned my egg-timer upside down and that the sand had started to run the other way. I was not at all comfortable.

  One blistering Saturday when strange currents seemed to be racing through the house the brusque Doctor, who was a lady but wore a grey flannel suit with a black tie, had some urgent words with my father and I suddenly found myself walking with him through the careless weekend shoppers of Hampstead. He walked rather quickly, and I was always a little behind him, sweating and bumping into people with prams and baskets and vaguely aware that we had been sent out of the house to await the arrival of the Baby. In a florists near the Heath we spent quite a long time selecting carnations. He bought a vast bunch, choosing them individually, striped pink and white. They were my mother’s favourite flower and although they reminded me of Weddings and Death these were destined for a Birth. We then went into a large Stationers and Newsagents where he slowly and thoughtfully chose tubes of oil paint, some tracing paper and a random selection of pen-nibs and bought me a copy of Boys Own. This surprised me more than the strange assortment of things he was purchasing for himself. Boys Own was very glossy and more expensive than any of the other magazines we were normally able to afford. I realised that he was not, perhaps, being as casual as he seemed. Then we walked back, in silence, down Heath Street to the rather ugly house which was my Centre. It had a high gable, fake beams and two acacia trees in the front garden.

  Lally opened the door before we reached it looking rather hot and a little rumpled. But she was half smiling through her anxiety, so I knew immediately that things were more or less all right. Looming behind her in the hall, pulling on her gloves, was Doctor Findlayson, about to leave in her dark green Sunbeam parked at the gate.

  “She had a hard time,” she said cheerfully. “But she’s not a girl any longer. It’s a boy by the by and she’d like to see you as soon as she’s ready.” She gave us both a cold smile, lit a cigarette, and went out to her car.

  My father ran up the staircase. I stood and watched the doctor drive away in a hurry. A boy, I thought. Ah well… but mother had not died.

  I sat in the window seat in the hall and waited. Unconsciously aware that I might be needed or sent for. I rifled through the glossy pages of Boys Own and kept one ear cocked for the awaited cry of the Baby. It was Nurse Hennessy, at the top of the stairs, who called me. Not the Baby. She was smiling and carried a white bundle.

  “Come up and meet your little brother!” she cried as if we were all at a party.

  It looked, from my point of view, like rabbit-offal wrapped in a shawl. I was silent with shock at the sight of this living stranger in our midst. This was the bulge in my mother’s belly. This the cause of the vastly disturbed household.

  The Nursery smelled of powder and methylated spirit. She unwrapped the offal and laid it in my reluctant arms.

  “Hold its neck. Otherwise its head will fall off, and we don’t want that, do we!” I was not altogether sure.

  Small fists beat helplessly in slow motion at a bloated, scarlet, screwed-up, old man’s face. The head weighed tons, the neck seemed delightfully frail. It kicked hard, and I saw the long twisting tube which still trailed from his belly. Nurse Hennessy stuffed a cigarette into her mouth and, taking up some scissors and a reel of white string, showed me how to tie “in” this gristly worm. I was not at all over anxious to do as she suggested, but she said that I was the Eldest and that it was fitting that I should tie up the cord which had attached my brother to his mother all the time that he was growing inside her. She felt, although I rather doubted it myself, that mother would “like this”. I didn’t think she’d care one way or the other but fiddled with string and gristle and scissors until I had achieved some form of a knot.

  “There!” cried Nurse Hennessy. “Now he really is part of this World! All we have to do is wash him thoroughly and
that’ll rot off in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  In my mother’s room the blinds were drawn against the sun; the room was hot and smelled of hospitals. She lay, a large lump, exhausted and overheated, in the great oak bed which she and my father shared. She wore a pretty lace boudoir cap with little bows, and tried to smile in a pale way, reaching out her hand, as I came to the side of the bed.

  “I hope you’ll be good to him,” she said in a whispering voice. “He was a lot of hard work, I can tell you.”

  I told her, politely, for I was a little afraid of this exhausted, hot, woman who had just had a difficult time and who seemed to be almost in a dream, that I had been shown by Nurse Hennessy how to tie off my brother’s cord. She smiled wearily and waved a hand vaguely in the air. “She’s a silly bitch!” she said gently. “Brought me a soft boiled egg and toast, can you imagine what an idiot she is. For God’s sake take it away and hide it. Give it to Lally and tell her to throw it away.” And she seemed to lapse into a troubled sleep and left me standing helplessly looking at the neat little tray and the boiled egg.

  Lally snorted and silently stuffed the lot into the sink. “A glass of beer would do her more good, that I can tell you. But you daren’t say a thing to these Nurses.” She shoved the kettle on to the gas stove and started to lay up a small tray with the best china and a little lace cloth. From somewhere far away it seemed we heard the first cries.

  Angry, defiant, furious at being late. We looked at each other with very different thoughts. She shook some sugar lumps into a china bowl. The crying went on. It was not to stop for two years.

  “We thought it better,” said my mother gently a few weeks later, “than a Boarding School. You really are a bit late for that now, and Aunt Belle adores you and you like her and she has always wanted to have you. She even wanted to adopt you ages ago when you were first born because she thought that I would not be able to bring you up properly. And a Scottish Education is what you need. It’s far better than an English one. And you really have had all the chances down here and nothing seems to work. You just can’t go on being a duffer, can you?”

  She looked beautiful, as she always did, and calm and collected. Obviously this had all been planned before. I was to go to school in Scotland, to stay with her childless sister and her husband, to live near her family, to be brought up by strangers, even if they were Family, and to leave my Centre and my life to which I had happily become accustomed. The shock took some time to hit me. But when it did I was prostrate. Now I was no longer needed. The Baby had become the centre of the Universe. Even my sister had turned traitor and spent hours holding it and kissing it and washing it. Lally, beloved, adored, Lally was preoccupied now with getting rid of the Nurse and restoring the “roses to your mother’s cheeks” and my father, after the splendour of the amazing Boys Own, had retreated even further away from me than ever.

  He was, evidently, putting aside the unpleasant things, as I did, and as he was good at doing. And sending me off, willy nilly, to a strange school in a strange land with strange people could surely be called “unpleasant”, even by him.

  But, as Lally pointed out, boiling water and steeping great mounds of chrome nappies in a large zinc bath, I had had my chances and had failed them. The Tutor had cost a lot of money, so had the school on the Hill and the uniforms and all the rest of the stuff I had been forced to wear during Term time. Producing plays, however clever, was not going to get me to learn my sums or my spelling and all that sort of thing. What I needed, she said very kindly, was a bit of a “pull on the reins”. And this, they all felt sure, was what Scotland and Aunt Belle and Uncle Duff and a very tough school in Glasgow would do for me.

  In an emperic state of Self Pity, to which, when things go against my wishes, I am prone, I lay on my bed in my room at the top of the house and, through tear-filled eyes, said most of my farewells to the wallpaper. Blue tits smothered in wisteria. My own deathly choice. The jar of snails by my bed held no delights now. They never had in fact, frightfully boringly they only seemed to eat at night and never moved about in the daylight… the small altar which I had made in a corner, looked dusty and un-prayed at. It was. But today it held sudden attractions. I wondered if perhaps a prayer, even so late, would help. But I was too shattered with shock and self pity to move from the bed. I realised that no one wanted me now, and that no one cared about me. The sooner I was removed from this uncaring place the better. It might even, though this did not seem remotely possible at that time, be very interesting in Scotland. I did like my Aunt. I liked the idea of the journey there. I even liked the distant memories of my grandmother’s teas and all my uncles and aunts and the odd way they all spoke and eating sticks of Edinburgh Rock. And oat cakes. And even porridge.

  I might even like the school. But I felt that I could never really forgive them here for chucking me out without warning. The eldest! Ha! Now that they had a younger one I was to be put aside and dumped “with relations” for God’s sake, in a foreign land.

  I knew, with savage insight, that I detested that screaming bundle of waving arms and legs on the floor below. I was even being thrown out of My Room so that my sister could have it while Lally shared the Nursery with the howling intruder. They would change the wisteria and the blue tits. Throw away my snails, muddle my books and drawings, even open my desk, and put my clothes in a different place in the house. I was in despair, a mounting wave of dislike and anger rose within me which nearly made me sick. I would never forgive that stinking, smelly, shrieking, little beast who had burst, unwelcome, into my perfect Two Pivot and Centre Life. And I didn’t for over twenty years.

  Before she married my father, my very beautiful mother had been an actress. She had reached her peak of success in “Bunty Pulls The Strings” at the Haymarket in 1911. A point in history which we were never to forget. Nor were we ever allowed to forget.

  All through childhood we were delighted and saddened with long recitations which she had memorised in order to Entertain The Boys from the Front. They ranged from super Show-Stoppers like “Billy’s Rose” which began: “Billy’s dead and gone to Heaven, So has Billy’s sister Nell” which reduced us all to snivelling sobs long before the final stanzas, to “The Story of Dan Ma’grew” right through Hilaire Belloc and all those “Heartless Tales For Hearthless Homes”. We were entranced and delighted. When the War got into its stride she marched all over the country with Concert Parties entertaining the wounded, billed as “Always Applauded”, and fondly known to all and sundry as “Little Madge”. Finally she went into Munitions when the War got really desperate about 1917 and went back towards London and the Theatre as soon as the Armistice was signed. Life was not easy for young actresses then, no easier than it is today, and to make ends meet she posed for Hands and Head, only, at the Slade, the St Martin’s and Chelsea Polytechnic. While awaiting the Call from Cochran; which never came.

  In 1920, after a famous Chelsea Arts Ball, she was given a room in someone’s studio who was in Paris for three weeks. Without money, with no real roof over her head at that time, and with a group of jolly young artists and actors all in the same boat, she settled happily down to sleep off the delights and exhaustions of the Albert Hall. The young man returned from Paris, with ‘flu, two weeks early. That is to say three hours after my mother had comfortably crawled into his vacant bed. She was swiftly ejected by him, and forced, since it was a strange house and she didn’t know her way around it having entered it so shortly before, to spend the night huddled in the remains of her Fancy Dress, a Spanish Shawl and a borrowed mantilla, on the mat outside his room. Her anger and rage knew no bounds. However, she discovered that he was ill and stayed to nurse him. Three weeks later they were married. A honeymoon in France and then back to the same tall brick house in St George’s Road, West End Lane, which my father owned and let out as rooms to his artist and writer friends. And then came The Call—from Hollywood.

  Mother was asked to go to California to join the Lasky Players. Seeing hers
elf thrusting Theda Bara from the confines of the screen, she packed a bag and signed the contract. In that order. My astonished, but cool, father said that it was either Lasky or himself; she could not have both. After days of tearful pleading, sulking, and despair, she stayed, and never ever got further West in her life than New York when she was well over fifty. She never forgot, however, and she never, totally, was able to forgive. But she was a good, properly brought up young woman, and honour was honour and the pact she made with my father lasted happily all their lives together. But the dull pain, and the vague feeling of disappointment, even un-achievement, was to remain buried away inside all her life. And all of ours.

  I was born the following March. She was delighted, if vague, about it all. She has always said that I was conceived in Paris, which I do not doubt, for they travelled extensively to France in that first year of marriage, and that she was determined I should be born there. However, she muffed that too through no fault of her own, and though it was touch and go that I should be born in a taxi, they made the nursing home and I arrived at eight-thirty in the morning of March 28th, 1921. From that moment on, loving my father as much as she clearly did, she knew that she was trapped. No longer could Hollywood beckon. Well, it could; but she was never to be able to heed its call. Not that it ever did call again; but she never completely gave up hope.

  My mother’s background was a large Victorian Ayrshire family. Eleven children in all. She was last but three in the line. My grandfather, once a man of substance, was elegant, handsome, a gifted painter and an indifferent Actor. He was Cartoonist for a Glasgow paper, and was adored by all who met him. He wore cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, and loved my mother most of all his children for she was the “one most like me”. Eventually, unable to bear the tremendous constrictions of a tight family life he left home and went out into the world with The Actors, joining the Neilson Terrys, the Forbes Robertsons and the Cyril Maudes and finally, kidnapping my mother from the home, she was ten, pressed her into service as his servant and companion. Together for a number of years, they toured the Provinces, coming, happily, to rest under the elegant portals of the Haymarket Theatre in “Bunty Pulls The Strings”.