A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  I arrived, that first morning, long before anyone else. I was excessively nervous and it was also my job to open up the theatre, arrange the stage for the reading and see that there was lavatory paper in the lavatories and a packet of Typhoo tea in the little kitchen. There were also a dozen cups and two packets of Crawford’s Custard Creams. I parked my bike by the scene dock, opened the Theatre, seeing the wide beams of sunlight streak across the blue velvet seats, set the “props” and took my copy of the play out into the buttercup field and sat under a giant oak. I felt that, as I was just about to commence my Acting Career, it might be wiser not to sit anxiously huddled on the bare stage too eagerly waiting, but to go and sit in the fields and start it all off from the peace and the calm of the country which I so loved. When they were ready, I reckoned, they’d come for me. Never be over anxious.

  Someone came ruffling through the long nodding grasses behind me, whistling softly. I looked up from my script. A tall, well built, smiling man of about thirty stood before me looking oddly out of place in the buttercups dressed, as he was, in a double-breasted suit, brown suede shoes, long white cuffs with gold links and a rather faded carnation in his buttonhole. One of the actors for sure.

  “Hullo,” he said. “Do you work here?”

  “Yes. At the theatre. I’m an actor.”

  “So am I. I hate First Readings, don’t you?”

  I didn’t know but agreed. He offered me a piece of barley sugar which he assured me was excellent for energy and also for the voice. We started to walk towards the Theatre, a brick box glinting in the morning sun; there were people wandering in and out of the doors. My companion started to breathe deeply, throwing his arms wide as if he was about to take off and fly over the town. I was still wearing my cycle clips and we laughed as I pulled them off and shoved them into a pocket.

  “My name’s Wightman,” he said. “William, but they call me Bill. I just think I’ll have a quick pee before we go in, do you know where it is?”

  I told him and watched his tall, burly figure going round the side of the Theatre to the Gents.

  My first counsellor and adviser had arrived.

  The weeks which followed, up until the opening of the play, were filled with joys and excitements. The other actors, with the generosity of their kind, welcomed me into their midst and we all settled down as one tightly knit company. An oddity of living which only actors seem to be able to achieve. This effect of permanence in a very temporary situation.

  Bill Wightman became our leader; he was always jolly, kind, patient, amused and also the possessor of a modest, but adequate, private income which he always most generously shared with us. He also had a car, which, locked into the quietness of a pretty dull, if pretty, country town, was absolutely essential and proved a much needed escape for us all to rarer places like Eastbourne, Brighton or even London. Quite apart from his own considerable personal charm, warmth and wisdom, Bill’s car was the Pipe in Hamelin, if he could be called, as he was, the Piper. But he was as much sought after for his advice and counsel as any of the more obvious pleasures which he could give. Every young Actor, or Actress, is plagued by the most appalling doubts and fears and only another actor can really share or understand them.

  So it was with Bill. His patience was monumental, his encouragement enormous, his good humour apparently inexhaustible, and his ear always available to listen to the problems with which we burdened him almost continually.

  The play opened to critical acclaim from the local papers, and to a financial disaster. Not enough people wanted to come to a grim play about Middle Europe and the Fascists when they had narrowly avoided the problem for themselves only a few months ago. The Town was split into two groups, those who thought the Theatre was an asset to the place and those who thought a Hospital would be more useful. There were rumbles of dissent among the gentle hills of East Sussex. Talk of Rates and Taxes and Robbing the People, of Intellectuals pushing Propaganda plays in a Civic Theatre when the theatre, as everyone knew, was supposed to be there for Entertainment. There was also the vexed problem of no Centre Aisle and what would happen in a fire, they’d all like to know?

  The dissent grew so strong that Miss Thorburn herself, cycling back to her cottage in Nutley one evening, was set upon by children and stoned while they all yelled “Witch! Witch!” causing her to fall from her bike and severely cut her knee and an eye.

  It didn’t stop her one jot. Sitting in her study, her leg up on a stool, reading through a magnifying glass with her Good Eye, she went through countless plays searching for her next production.

  My father, driven to distraction by my insistence now that I should become an Actor, with so much success clearly turning my head, arranged an audition for me at the Old Vic. I still don’t know how he did it but suspect that owing to his position on “The Times” and the help which he had given them in the past by putting in photographs of the Productions as often as he could, they felt a little blackmailed and I was summoned to the Theatre on Tuesday, August the 8th at 2.30. Armed with three “well contrasted pieces” as demanded by the proprietors, I walked up and down the Waterloo Road mumbling away at “Is This A Dagger?” from “Macbeth”, the whole of Blunden’s “Forefathers” which begins:

  “Here they went with smock and crook,

  Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade,

  Here they mudded out the brook …”

  which I found moving, referring as it did to the Last War, and the country life I loved; and also a frightful chunk of my monologue from the play I had written for the NADS about the poor blind man on his bench. Nothing light, clearly. I don’t remember, for all my terror, much about the audition except that I am sure it amused them more than impressed them, and the glittering cold eyes of Tyrone Guthrie frightened me more than anything ever before. They were, to paraphrase a description of Aldous Huxley’s, “pale blue and triangular, like the eyes peering from the mask of a Siamese cat”. But, much to everyone’s astonishment, I passed, and was accepted to hold spears and carry swords and possibly play “one of Romeo’s Friends”, in the forthcoming production of that play which would start rehearsals on September the 4th.

  In my green Gamages suit, I ran almost all the way to Victoria, in spite of the extremely hot day, and telephoned my father at the office to tell him. He was calm and rather quiet. He said that he would write immediately to Williamson at the Chelsea Poly and hoped now that I was satisfied. He didn’t say that he was.

  Williamson’s letter in return was regretful. He felt, he said, that I had talent far above average and that it seemed a pity to let it all go—but this meant nothing to me for I didn’t even know of the letter until many years afterwards. For the time being my horizons were vast. I would start with my spears and swords and being “one of Romeo’s Friends” and bit by bit, for I was in no hurry and realised that it would be a slow process, I would eventually become one of those glorious, and honoured, people who could call themselves Classical Actors. I never wanted, then, to become a Star. I never remotely sought, as so many of my contemporaries did, my Name In Lights—I didn’t want the responsibilities that would bring; all I wanted to do was to achieve respect, acknowledgement, and honour in the profession for which I longed.

  If this sounds naive and dimwitted then so I was. All I can say, from all this distance, is that that is what I felt and what I still feel to this day. It never changed.

  My mother was, secretly, very pleased. But she hardly did more than give me a hug and remind me that my pleasure must be equalled only by the disappointment of my father who had hoped, and worked, for so long to encourage me to take over from him when his time came to retire.

  Bill, in whom I now confided constantly, which must have irritated him a good deal but which he never let show, was delighted and counselled me to be patient, humble, and, above all, diligent, to work very hard and deserve the honour of having been admitted to, what he called, one of the most distinguished companies of actors in the entire world. I promise
d him that I would.

  A few weeks before I had gone down to see him in a series of plays which were being performed in a tithe barn at Shere in Surrey. The barn was draughty, dark, up a little grassy track behind the village. The actors welcomed me into the company as if I were a member and permitted me to watch every play, and nearly every performance, free and when I liked. The plays were all rather, what the Uckfield Council Members would have called Intellectual, and so were most of the audiences, and although I was not always able to follow the plots I was vividly aware of what my grandfather in Scotland had told me sitting beside his range in the kitchen in Glasgow. The lovely words… I revelled in the sounds and shapes of them, in the things they evoked for me, in the astonishing beauty of them.

  I fed, all that season, on words as if they were my main form of nourishment: which spiritually indeed they were. Everyone, as I have said, was very friendly, but especially one actor, a youth of my own age, whose enthusiasms and excitement exactly matched my own. In a pair of wrinkled tights with a shock of wild hair, bright eager eyes and wild gestures, he sat with me on the grass outside the Barn watching the audiences arrive up the scraggy little path and spoke passionately, and fluently, of his love and his dedication for his job. We were born, we discovered, on exactly the same day of the same month of the same year—and almost to the hour. I felt, therefore, a very close affinity to him, and although he had gone much further ahead than I, for he not only acted but wrote and had written the main play of the Season, I felt that as we both so clearly held exactly the same beliefs, hopes, ideals and burning passions for our craft, that in fact we almost were twins, and given time and the chance I would one day catch him up and together we should storm the world.

  “But,” he said, brushing the grass off his tights and starting towards the big stage door, “you have to be totally dedicated. Totally. Nothing else will do here.” I wasn’t absolutely sure what he meant by dedication, but his intensity was such that I clearly understood that to follow my profession correctly and successfully had to be almost a form of religion. This important encounter with Peter Ustinov was to prove the final blow to my patient father. My passion and determination were so great, that he finally capitulated, and I was offered the audition at the Old Vic.

  Four days before I was due to make my way along the Waterloo Road to my first rehearsal Germany invaded Poland. My father’s face at breakfast was very grave, my mother’s ashen.

  “I don’t think that this time we’ll avoid it,” he said.

  Never had the sun shone so splendidly, never had the Common lain so still in a haze of heat and shimmering light. Never had the Old Vic seemed so far away.

  On the Saturday evening, dressed in my green suit and a yellow polo neck shirt, I went off with Buster and Cissie Waghorn and a thin girl whose name I don’t remember. We drove in Buster’s car to a Road House near East Grinstead and had lager and roast lamb.

  Afterwards through a sudden, crashing thunderstorm, we drove, almost in silence, all the way to Brighton. The town was deserted. Few cars, and those that were were dimmed out, few lights—it was a half blackout—no one walking. The holiday-makers had melted away. We were alone on the deserted promenade. Buster parked the car under a lamp by the King Alfred’s School, and we hung over the promenade railings looking down at the black sea and then the rumbling, fading storm, moving slowly across to France. The car radio was playing softly and we started, very quietly, to dance together, cheek to cheek, holding on to each other Cissie and I, and Buster and the thin girl. Lightning flashed in great silent forks across the hot, swelling sea, the surf rustled and clawed on the shingle below, and to the gentle crackling strains of “Deep Purple” we slowly, unhappily, shuffled into the war.

  Chapter 14

  The launching of a nation into a war seemed, to me at least, remarkably like the launching of a great ship. In Scotland I had seen the slow, ponderous slide of the 534, later to be called the Queen Mary, as it inched down the slipway into the river. At one moment it was quite still. At the next, almost imperceptibly, it moved away from its berth, snapping poles like spaghetti, chains like cotton threads, and as it gained speed, growing ever faster, the rusty metal mass hit the water sending up a swelling tidal wave which rippled higher and higher and faster and faster across the river and engulfed the crowds on the opposite bank.

  But it was all, or so it seemed, in silence. In slow motion, without the benefit of cheers, flags or bands playing. We were overawed. So it was with the start of the war, almost the same actions from start to finish.

  In the first instance everything melted away. Chelsea Poly remained firmly shut; theatres, including the Old Vic, and cinemas closed; silver balloons rose gently into the air ringing London; and everyone who could, or had to, went into one Service or another. And all the lights went out.

  In the first eager flush I, with others of my own age, hurried to our local Labour Exchanges to volunteer, only to be told, by harassed clerks, that we would not be wanted until we had reached the age of nineteen. I had a year to go. Buster, more fortunate than I by virtue of being nineteen already, got into the RAF and was blown to bits over Kent the following summer; Cissie went off to Portsmouth and became a WREN; and Nerine, trained and able, and becoming bossier and bossier as the days went by, was organising herself very securely into the Red Cross and Ambulance Brigade. Everyone, it seemed, was busy except me.

  Life was spent in a limbo of unwantedness. Until I was organised to help clear out countless empty sheds, garages, stables and barns which had been commandeered to receive the first of the sad, bewildered, evacuees who came hourly from London, lugging crying children, bursting suitcases, and stuck about with humiliating cardboard labels. These wretched women were soon taken in charge by officious, but kindly, County Ladies who bundled them off in trucks or cars to their straw-filled shelters with cups of tea and five cigarettes apiece.

  Miss Thorburn’s Theatre was one of the first places to be taken over, and with its seats stripped out, filled with straw, provided miserable bed spaces for a couple of hundred. Everyone who could took in their own evacuees. We had two pale, nervous, unhappy brothers who arrived one afternoon and stayed for a year.

  It might seem strange, in a country so suddenly tipped into a War, that there was absolutely nothing for me to do. I was the wrong age for that moment. Limbo forced me into solitude again, painting acres of battle scenes from a now out of date war, and writing reams of sentimental, over-emotional, staggeringly bad poems. All of which ended in tear-drenched despair or a row of ambiguous dots. Mostly because I didn’t know how to write Full Stop.

  My friends were all occupied happily enough; my sister, now a groom at a stables at Scaynes Hill; my mother with the Women’s Institute and other Good Works; the house filled with our glum strangers from Finsbury Park. I decided to go to London and try and find something to do there. My father, tired, harassed, overworked, accepted the suggestion with almost indecent alacrity. I had a year to go, he said, before my Call Up … however the war was certain to be over before Christmas so that needn’t worry me, but he felt that I should use the year in trying to get work and see if I could make my way in the Theatre when, and if, they re-opened. He gave me ten shillings a week for a year and suggested that I leave as soon as possible.

  Which I did. The next afternoon. With a suitcase, an extra ten shillings from my vaguely apprehensive mother, and Aunt Freda Chesterfield’s telephone number in Kensington so that I could beg a bed from her until I was settled into whatever I was going to do.

  To my relief they all seemed quite glad to see me go, so I arrived in an almost empty Victoria, the next afternoon, guiltless but very aware of one important factor. The night before I left, my father quietly said that a year was all he could afford, and that if I had not made my way in my chosen profession by that time, to the day, I was to return and do precisely and exactly what he said I would do. Starting as a messenger boy at The Times.

  I had agreed, over confidently.
As he was over confident that the war, so newly started, would be over and done with by the end of the next two months.

  Aunt Freda lived in a Mansion Flat behind Pontings. She was warm, unsurprised, which was her nature, and said that there was a bed if I wanted it but that I’d have to find my own meals. There was always, as long as it lasted, bread, milk and cheese in the Fridge, and beyond that I was on my own. She would not, she said, make any charge, and I’d have to find my own laundry since she already had a full house. She gave me a key, half a crown, and hoped I’d manage, and said that she would mention me at Mass.

  It was a strange sandbagged, almost empty, London through which I drifted. And every bit as dull and boring as it was in Sussex. No one had seen an aeroplane, or been gassed, or had a parachutist in the back yard. And as the first panic started to melt away under the strange calm, people began to return to the City and life almost came back to normal. Except for Air Raid Wardens, the gas masks, and the discomfort and indeed danger of the Black Out, nothing might have happened at all on that hot, last Saturday of Peacetime.

  Total boredom and a longing for something green sent me off on a bus to Kew Gardens to see the Pagoda and perhaps look about in the Palm House. But I never got there in the end. Stopping for a moment at Kew Bridge, the bus provided a grandstand view of what appeared to be a builder’s yard. Doors and windows, some scattered fireplaces, piles of junk and a girl painting a cut-out tree which was leaning against the wall of the yard. Beside this muddle of wood and canvas was a small squat building. Across the facade, in shabby letters, the words “Q THEATRE”.

  I ran down the steps, jumped off as the bus started again, and went towards a half open door into the yard. The painting girl looked up rather crossly. She was covered in blobs of green distemper and wore an old pair of navy blue trousers and a man’s shirt. She was startled and hot.