A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  The Coxes were very pleasant. Two girls and a small boy who hardly counted because, like Gareth, he was too young. But the other two were all right. Nerine and Heather (their father also owned a Nursery Garden which grew Alpines, hence their names) liked toads and snakes, rabbits and ponds and both of them liked acting and writing. So far so good. Nerine said that the Dances were “terrific fun” and that all I needed was a suit and a tie and that she would help me to learn in no time at all. It was arranged.

  Every Saturday night I dressed carefully, clambered on to my bike and rode the three miles to Newick. The Coxes’ house, “Chez Nous”, was rather grand, much bigger than ours and covered in wisteria and small diamond-paned windows. Before the Dance began we sat nervously in their sitting-room sipping chilled white wine and seltzer with Bath Olivers. I was deeply impressed. Then to the Hall next door where, on a chalked wood floor, I swooped and twirled and fell over to music played on a tall cabinet gramophone amplified through two blaring loudspeakers. This machine was called a radiogram, and no one was allowed to touch it except Mr Cox himself who arranged the records and the dances and jiggled them about magically for the “Paul Jones” and “The Excuse Me Dance.”

  The Hall had a stage at one end with blue sateen curtains and a tall iron stove with a chimney which burned lumps of coke and made everyone choke if they danced too close to it. Around the walls droopy flags and streamers from a forgotten Christmas and little rickety card tables with plates of bridge rolls and cress sandwiches. Half time was Tea and Lemonade. The last waltz, when Mr Cox turned down all the lights, and sometimes accidentally turned them off, was at ten o’clock so that everyone could get their coats and the last bus home.

  I was better at dancing than skating. At least I could move into the centre of the floor and didn’t fall over as often. But I got very stuck with Slow Foxtrots and Quick Steps and really only shone when it came to the “Valeta” or “Roger de Coverley”. I always managed to slip out and have a Black Cat while the Latin American dancing was on; this I found too fast and difficult.

  Everyone enjoyed themselves very much. The men tidy in blue suits and dance slippers, the girls in glossy silk frocks with low necklines and little puffed sleeves. We were all very hot and shiny, and laughed too much, especially during the “Paul Jones” when one changed partners with dizzying, often reckless speed. The sweet smell of sweat, Lux Toilet Soap, French Chalk and Camp Coffee was strong stuff. The evenings always ended far too soon.

  My favourite partner, because she flattered me outrageously, was Cissie Waghorn who came from Uckfield and who, though rather taller than myself, and two years older, danced beautifully and helped to teach me with patience and care—even getting me to stumble about in “The Conga” which we all thought rather daring and new. One night, after a very spirited, if inaccurate, Thunder and Lightning Polka she told me, sitting together in a red, breathless, heap, that I had Beautiful and Expressive hands. They were, she said very seriously, an Artist’s Hands and Creative. I was overcome. For days I walked about with them hanging limply at the end of my arms afraid to damage them in any way. They were, to me, thick, clumsy, stubby fingered hands. I now thought better of them and started doing more exercises, with the Smiling ones in the mirror. My sister found me, pardonably, repellent.

  But little did Cissie Waghorn know that she had started a thread of fire which was shortly to consume my entire being. Not just my dangling, cold-creamed, heavily Expressive hands. Unfortunately it all went to my head, and for a long time I couldn’t even lift a cup to my lips without giving it the importance of the Holy Grail. I seldom do anything in half measures.

  What I yearned for now was somewhere to show off these things I had learned, the Expressive hands, the Mocking Smile, the elegance of the Slow Waltz. What better than on that blue shrouded stage at the end of the Hall?

  All my life I had wanted to be an actor. All my life that is from about the age of four when, draped in a cast off curtain and an old hat with a pheasant’s tail stuck in it, I had acted my own plays to myself in my room. Then came the progression, under Lally’s care and interest, during the Twickenham holidays … and the plays my sister and I used to “do” up in the barn near the Cottage. Tremendously ambitious plays about the sinking of the Titanic with myself as the Captain (in a sailor’s cap naturally) and my unfortunate sister playing Ottoline Morrell (in a wide-brimmed hat with roses on it and a red plush table cloth). I can’t think why she had to be Lady Ottoline. Perhaps because I thought that she looked like her and that Lady Ottoline must have been the kind of woman who would have been spunky enough to stay on the ship while they played “Nearer My God To Thee”. That was my plot anyway. And I stuck to it.

  Even at my miserable Altar near Bishopbriggs there had been a form of acting even if not in its purest sense, and late in 1936 the seal was finally set on my decision in the most obvious way imaginable.

  Yvonne Arnaud was my Godmother. Not, you understand, my real Godmother: there were two or three of them floating about whom I was never to see after the ceremonial presentations of silver napkin rings and feeding spoons. Yvonne adopted Godchildren as some women adopt habits. Unthinkingly, wholeheartedly and devotedly. She never held me at any Font, nor promised to keep me to The Faith, but she never forgot a Birthday, a Christmas, even an Easter, and was more adored than anyone of the “family blood”. She had known my parents, in the tall brick house in St George’s Road days, and so I can safely claim to have been one of the earliest of the thousands of Godchildren she was to accumulate later in her life.

  She arrived, or so the posters announced, on one dull day at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, with a try-out of a new farce, “Laughter In Court”. I left a note at her hotel and was bidden to an early luncheon on Matinee day.

  The suite was a Kew Gardens of bloom and blossom, Yvonne sailing towards me, arms outstretched, flowing chiffon and scarves billowing about her like the vaguest of delicious dreams; her apparent delight at seeing me, her glorious chuckle, “But darling! You have grown enormous!” relaxed me and we sat down to lunch, she brimming with questions, I brimming with contentment and happiness, over-eager to answer her queries after years, it seemed, of silence, save for my moaning pleas to the Slate Altar.

  “Why are you here and not at school? You are at school surely?”

  “No. Not today … I mean I should be …”

  “And you are not?”

  “No. I’m playing truant.”

  Wide surprised eyes; a quick crackle of Melba Toast.

  “What is this Truant… a game. It is a game?”

  I explained briefly and embarrassedly. She looked stern.

  “But darling, if you do not do your lessons what will you become? And they will find out you know. That is deceitful and wicked of you. Do you like Spineeche? It is full of iron and very good for your teeth.”

  Through smoked salmon, chicken and a raspberry ice, I confessed all; about not trying any longer and the stifled, bursting ambition to go away and be an actor like my mother and grandfather. The jolly smiles faded from Yvonne’s eyes; she looked very serious indeed sipping her coffee.

  “Have you ever tried to be an actor, my darling?”

  “At school… in a play last term. And always at home with my sister, that’s all.”

  “It is not very easy, you know, but if you would like to see how hard it is I can show you.”

  When the curtain rose on the Second Act of “Laughter In Court” that Thursday matinee, I was in the Press Box of the Court Room Scene. “He’s too young! He’s a boy,” cried a worried looking man. “Put him at the back, darling,” said Yvonne brusquely. “If I mix him up with the other Supers he’ll look like a Juvenile Delinquent!” “That’s exactly what ’ee ‘ees!” cried my Godmother, “and so are most of the Press.”

  The rippling whisper of that curtain going up, whatever they say and however many times they say it, is the most wonderful sound in the entire world to an actor’s ears. More, even, than appla
use. I was sick with excitement, shaking with terror, cool as a cucumber and, for the first time ever in my whole life, I knew precisely, as if it had all happened before, where I was and, what was more important, who I was. I fitted. I belonged. My stupid, slothful brain burst asunder the strings of its inertia and incomprehension and started to learn. Like an engine slowly throbbing into life, my whole frame started to glow with energy and I saw the road, very clearly, stretched out before me.

  I knew, there and then in that painted Press Box, that I had found my place. Like the rattling, wobbling, steel ball in a pin table, I had battered round the pins, hit a spring and shot into my little hole. Lights flashed; the score went up. No one had to tilt.

  And now with my inaccurately reflecting mirror, the endless compliments from Cissie Waghorn and the total unawareness of Elsie Brooks … I knew that I must step upon a stage and let an audience judge what so far only I myself and one devoted dancing partner knew. And what Elsie would not fail to know when she saw it. I was ready for the World.

  Readiness was tested at the end of that year, in the village hall, with the local amateur dramatic society into which I was permitted entry, although under age, as a naked slave in the second act of “Alf’s Button”. An inauspicious start. Half naked, dressed in baggy chiffon knickers, a gold turban, a squint moustache, I stood impassively, arms folded across my chest holding a paper scimitar in one hand and my terror in the other. I never moved, and no one really saw me. But there is a picture of me in the local paper to prove it all. I was cold. Frightened. Idiotic. But I had started. And nothing now was ever going to stop me.

  Mr Cox, who produced, said I had Presence and Stillness. Hardly difficult the latter, as I was forbidden to move a muscle on my Turkish Staircase; as for Presence, I didn’t know about that but thought that he would. Cissie Waghorn was hopeful that in the next season I might get a better part and the local paper printed my name, for the first time, in its entirety, the van and the den and all. And Lally sent me a telegram. My cup was filling, if not exactly brimming. I knew, if no one else present that memorable night did, that I was on my way. All I had to do was explain it to the family and take the next train to Victoria.

  My father, when approached, looked vague, then worried, finally irritated. And said categorically No. It was no job for a man, he explained, rightly as I was later to find out; it was risky, and nearly all actors were out of work for years and years, also they were common, and in any case he had no intention, after the years of sweat and toil that had gone into whatever education I had managed to scratch together from the wreckage of all that had been offered me, of letting me follow such a lunatic, mediocre, ungentlemanly career. If career it ever was to be. I was to do as he had arranged. Finish school and start the new year as a student at the Chelsea Polytechnic and through a solid Art Education, as opposed to a solid Scottish one, prepare myself for my eventual arrival in Printing House Square.

  He was immeasurably gentle, he always was, but he was firm. And we all knew in the family that when he said No it was really No. There was, as Lally had said so often, No Shilly Shally about my father. My mother on the other hand was wistful, remembering her own, and her father’s world. But she took his side and endorsed what he said completely. I was on my own.

  “Alf’s Button” faded away gently, as did the dancing lessons under Cissie Waghorn and Nerine Cox’s devoted eyes, when I discovered, by asking her directly, that Elsie Brooks couldn’t dance anyway and had fallen in love with a garage mechanic in Lindfield. I went back to mucking out the rabbits and making bird-cages. I was not unduly cast down. After Scotland nothing was ever going to flatten me again. I’d wait till next year. There was time. Next year I would be sixteen, and an Art Student. Student meant, in those days, that one was Grown Up.

  The farewells in Glasgow were not at all difficult. Except for Aunt Hester and her family, to whom I knew I owed so much of this new liberation of spirit, and my maternal grandfather. I was almost indecently cheerful. I seldom ever saw my grandfather during the years I lived there. Banished, as he was, to sit by the kitchen range, and sleep in a bed set into the wall with curtains all around it (a Butt and Ben they called it), the only chances of seeing him I got were when the family were resting after Sunday luncheon and the maid was out of the kitchen.

  He sat in an armchair beside the big iron range, a small black and white dog at his side, his hands clasped on a stick, dozing gently. His hair was snow white, his jaw firm, his eyes clear and steady. I never ever knew why he was banished to live in the kitchen and sleep in the cook’s bed and he never told me. Not that I ever asked, it must be confessed. I imagined that it was probably a form of punishment for all the wickedness of his early life with my mother when, for so many years, they had stayed away from the family house and trailed willingly all over the country with wicker hampers and bookings for Crewe, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Cardiff and Liverpool, their makeup boxes in a Gladstone bag and enough money for two quarts of beer and “digs” in a street near the Theatre. But it was never spoken of and still is not. So all this is conjecture. Our few conversations together were conducted in conspiratorial whispers lest we should be caught by one of my aunts, a maid, or worst of all, the unforgiving figure of my black-woollied grandmother.

  “And what do you do with yourself, my boy?”

  “Well, I write a lot. Plays mostly.”

  “You like the Theatre? That’s good. Of course it’s in your blood. Your mother had a fine talent, a fine talent, but frittered it away in marriage. A pity.”

  “I want to be an actor when I’m old enough.”

  He used to chuckle, his wicked eyes opening with tired amusement: “You’ll never be Old Enough to be an Actor, my boy. Actors have to be always Young. We don’t get Older, you mark my words. You will do the Classics? Those lovely, lovely words. Sheridan, Congreve; lovely things to say. I was a very acceptable Surface you know in ‘Scandal’, did your mother tell you? You ask her… very acceptable. Forbes Robertson asked me to understudy him in ‘The Only Way’… but I missed it… now there’s a role for an actor! Carton … do you know it? Oh! What lovely things to say. …”

  I remember, after so many years, these words almost verbatim. Really because it was the only conversation, or topic of conversation, we ever had. Each time I spoke to him it was as if I had disturbed him in a continual ever-running band of thought. Forbes Robertson, Sheridan, the loveliness of words. It never varied. Once, when I asked him about Shakespeare (being at that time deeply into a simplified version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) he gruffly said that it had never come his way, and was not his “style”. He didn’t care for the blood and anxieties of the plays, he said; life was filled with that already in the streets outside, so what audience wished to be reminded of all that lay about them when they had to pay half a guinea for a good seat in order to forget?

  “Give them joy and delight… give them lovely words and good cheer, make them laugh, and cherish them!” he said firmly. “Cherish them as I cherish you, eh?” he said to the black and white dog at his knee. “Ah! Spot! What a wealth of lovely words you have had wasted on you. He doesn’t take it in, you know. Not a word.” He laughed without rancour.

  He collapsed in the street one day walking with “Spot” and died shortly afterwards in the white-tiled glare of a public ward. An actor’s life.

  Aunt Hester, tall, worried, continually harassed, loving, gentle as a dove, merely held me just that little bit longer in her arms at the station. Her eyes were sad.

  “You’ll be off in a minute. I hate farewells,” she said, and with a quick, nervous little wave, she hurried into the crowd, bumping into people. I settled back into my compartment, lit a Black Cat, and felt the train rumble over the Broomielaw Bridge. Looking out of the scummy window I watched the cranes and tugs and hulks of ships lining the sullen waters of the Clyde. I hoped never ever to see it again. And I never have.

  The three years in Scotland were, without doubt, the most imp
ortant years of my early life. I could not, I know now, have done without them. My parents, intent on giving me a solid, tough scholastic education to prepare me for my Adult Life, had no possible conception that the education I would receive there would far outweigh anything a simple school could have provided. Life before 1934, the Summer Life if you like, with Lally and my sister in the country and the near effortless marking-time existence at the Hampstead school, had seduced me into a totally unreal existence of constant happiness, simplicity, trust and love. What I clearly needed, and what I got, was a crack on the backside which shot me into reality so fast I was almost unable to catch my breath for the pain and disillusions which were to follow.

  To be sure it was a violent break, but it did not, I trust, find me weak: amazingly the Summer Life had made me strong; the break from it and all that was to follow, astonished me but left me unsurprised, cut me but left me unbloody, bewildered me but left me unafraid. And because of it I was able to enter the new phase of life which lay ahead of me with, if not total confidence (I have never had that), at least a thick veneer of it, and with the inbuilt belief that whatever happened to me anywhere at anytime, I would somehow, willy nilly, by hook or by crook, manage to survive. For myself alone if for no one else.

  The enforced loneliness in which I chose to dwell was not, when all is said and done, one long trail of misery and woe and barrenness. After all I was within the confines of my “family”, my own blood. I was cared for, comfortable, well fed and looked after by people who, by their own standards, were doing their very best to assist me. I was even at times pleasured for there were trips to hear choirs, to see football matches, the Teas and Bakings, walks in the Campsie Fells and on one occasion a short holiday by the sea at Dunure. No: the life they all offered me in that alien land was reasonable, kind, uncomprehending and in many ways most generous. The fact that I rebelled against all it offered was entirely my own fault and no one else’s. I tried to conform, but the conformation was unacceptable to us all. Compromise is a deathly weapon.