A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  “What do you want here? This is private, you know.”

  “It is a theatre, isn’t it?”

  She looked crosser than ever. “You’d better clear off… or else.”

  “I was wondering about a job … that’s all.”

  “Well, don’t bother me with your wondering, I’m busy and the office is in there.” She indicated a door which said Fire Exit and went back to her tree.

  It was practically identical, this meeting, to my arrival in the dark Theatre at Uckfield; a lone woman painting a flat … threatening me with a paint-brush and suspicion. But I didn’t think of that then. I followed her instructions blindly.

  A dark, untidy corridor, with a fire extinguisher and a glass-fronted door with “Office” painted on it. It was half open and there were voices. Just as I was about to knock, it opened and a small, hurrying little woman came out eating a cheese roll. She looked up at me mildly.

  “Yes?” She finished chewing, her eyes bright and interested, the half finished roll in her hand. I said that I was wondering if there was a job going. I’d seen the yard from the top of a bus and … She cut me short with a wave of the cheese roll: “Not auditioning today, dear … next week is all cast and we don’t see anyone without an appointment … come again.” She started to turn away back into the Office, when I said: “I meant painting, scenery and things. I’m an artist not an actor.”

  This stopped her. She took another bite of her roll and asked me where I came from. I said from nowhere particular but had trained at the Poly and worked in Sussex and at the Uckfield Playhouse. I made it sound like the Liverpool Rep.

  “What happened to the Uckfield Rep then?” she asked with a shrewd smile. “They fire you?”

  “No. They got commandeered for evacuees.”

  “And you did the sets, is that it?”

  I nodded. I didn’t say I’d done one only. She finished her roll, licked her fingers and turned back into the office. “You’d better come in and see my husband,” she said:

  Jack and Beatrice de Leon were legendary figures in the Theatre but at that moment, in my supreme ignorance of anything which happened far from the NADS or Uckfield, I was not to know. Jack was a silver haired, handsome man, as beautiful as a Persian, immaculately dressed always, tired, often; quiet and as shrewd as he was kind. His wife, Beattie as we all grew to call her after about half an hour’s talk, read his scripts, cast his plays, arranged his staff and sometimes played bits and pieces herself. Their whole life revolved about this converted skating rink in the Chiswick High Road, and to play at Q was considered to be one of the most important things for a young actor outside the immediate West End. My sudden arrival in their office that afternoon was providential. The regular set designer had walked off the day before, and with a new Show to open in a very short time and only one cross, tired, overworked girl to do it all there was indeed a job for me. I started work at the Q Theatre that afternoon on a verbal agreement of seven and six a week to help out in the scene dock, cart the props about, and do any odd jobs around the theatre which needed doing, from washing down the Gents Lavatory and calling the actors for the Curtain and the Entrances. I was, to all intents and purposes, by the grace of God and Jack and Beattie de Leon, launched.

  The cross girl, who was not really at all cross when I got back to the yard, but relieved that she had someone, even someone so inexperienced, to help her, said that her name was Tanya Moiseiwitsch and that we were starting out on a musical called “The Two Bouquets” by Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon. It was, she said, a sod with three big sets, one of them being, as she put it succinctly, “the entire bloody Twickenham Regatta”. It was on this backcloth that I was put to work, squaring up Eel Pie Island and half the river Thames. My Twickenham. My first truly professional job. If that wasn’t fate, I wondered, what was?

  There really wasn’t a great deal that I could do to help Tanya. She was very much more experienced than I, and as she was in the middle of the job I mostly scurried around boiling the glue, mixing the size, squaring up, and getting her cups of tea. But I had the impression that I was useful even banging in nails and stretching soggy, size-wet canvas. After a very short time my endless stream of questions started to dry up and I moved more and more about on my own.

  Apart from the Scene Dock there were other jobs to be done. I bought a new toothbrush and used my old one with a tin of Brasso (supplied) to bring the taps and pipes to shining life in the Gents. No cigarette ends were ever allowed in the sweet flowing china canal of my Gents. As soon as graffiti appeared, which was not often and usually between the matinee and evening performance, I blotted them out with a wipe of distemper, polished the mirrors and swabbed down the cracked marble floor after every interval. There seemed to be quite a lot of bad aimers.

  Adjacent to the Gents and opposite the auditorium was the Club Room. Q, like a number of other smaller theatres, had no licence or Bar but they were allowed to have Club Members… which meant a Club Room … which meant that if you were a Member, for very little extra per year, you were entitled to the use of the Club Room, as much drink as you could afford to consume, a snack or a meal before the Show and the month’s programme of events mailed to your door. I rather think you also received a slight reduction on your seats. In any event the Club Room, presided over by fat, jolly, Vi, thrived. It was not large, about eight tables and a corner bar, a gas fire, two or three armchairs and a long couch. I carted plates about, wiped down the tables, set the salt and pepper straight, saw they were filled, emptied the ash trays and collected the “empties”, thus saving Vi a certain amount of work and assuring myself of at least one good meal a day.

  If it had not been for Vi and the Club Room it is more than probable that I would have starved to death. Seven and sixpence a week, although a good deal more in 1939, was not very much. However, I managed pretty well. Aunt Freda’s free bed was a godsend of course, but I didn’t always use it… especially if we were in the middle of rehearsals when there simply wasn’t time to get back to Kensington. If there was a bed in the play of the week I was particularly lucky and slept, with the mice and the creaks, on that in the Prop shop. Or even on the couch from the Second Act. Never, however, in the Club Room which Vi locked firmly every evening before she left.

  I don’t think that I can have looked all that clean, thinking back. I shaved in cold water in the Prop Room … used my own Gents, of course, and managed a bath once or twice a week when I got back to Aunt Freda’s. First thing in the morning, before anyone but the milkmen were about, I was up and setting my little iron stove alight with bits of wood and paper and then heaved up the coke. Made the bed or couch on which I had slept a dreamless night, and started off down the Chiswick High Road for my breakfast. A packet of Maltesers from the local newsagent, just opened and stacking the papers for the delivery boy to collect, a packet of Woodbine, cheaper than Black Cat, and then a half bottle of milk, or a pint if I could find it, snitched from any old front door step on my way back to the theatre.

  Not long ago I was asked by one of those anguished middle-aged people who seem to dominate Television interviews if there was one really “awful, shaming, thing which I had ever done in my life and which still made me blush”. In the course of over fifty years there have been one or two. But the one single one which makes me really blush is the pinching of pints of milk and the thought of the perplexed morning faces when those doors were opened. However I reckoned that I needed it more than they did. I hadn’t even got a door to open… let alone a doorstep or a bottle of milk idly sitting trustfully there. And I never, ever, took the only one. I took from the Rich. Those who had ordered a pint and a half or anyway two bottles. I felt that was fair.

  I enjoyed waiting at table, a napkin over my arm, my hands clean, the typewritten menu offered, the little pad and pencil. All rubbish really: Vi only ever had two meals on her Menu. Grilled Gammon and Egg or Grilled Kidneys, Chops, and Two Veg. The veg depended on what she had managed to get that morning on her way to
work. But it all set a “tone”, I felt, and sometimes I got a tip. Which Vi allowed me to keep. If I told her. If I didn’t she never knew. It depended on the state of my week’s money. Sometimes the actors would send me out to the pub next door for a bottle of Guinness or a round of sandwiches and were often very generous with a couple of pennies or even, mostly from the women, a threepenny bit… and all in all by the time Saturday Pay Night came along I had usually managed to break even.

  As time went on I graduated more towards the actual Stage itself. Helping out the ASM, playing “God Save The King” at the end of the Show on a scratchy old ten inch HMV … and, on some terrifying occasions, actually “Holding the Book” of the play in the Prompt Corner and prompting the actors who “blew” a line. That was the nastiest part of all. The feeling of anxiety was too acute for comfort and sometimes I wondered if my own fear was affecting the actors on the stage for it always seemed to me that I had to prompt a performance more than the real ASM. Many of the plays only had a week’s rehearsal, so it was a pretty nerve-racking night, a First Night at Q.

  Taking the book at rehearsals was more relaxed and better for my learning. Day after day I sat through the play, in between waiting at table and swabbing down my Gents, and less and less I spent time in the Scene Dock. I was infinitely more use as, and more interested in being, general dogsbody. I was, of course, getting closer and closer to the Stage in this manner. Which was my intention. My pay packet, however, stayed firmly the same every Saturday Night. Three florins, a shilling and a sixpence. Sometimes the sixpence came in coppers.

  Until one afternoon Beattie came bustling into the Club Room where I was wiping down the tables and waiting for Vi to get my lunch of left-overs out of her oven.

  “Shouldn’t you be on the stage, dear? It’s Dress Rehearsal,” she said worriedly. I explained that one of the actors wasn’t feeling well and that the rehearsal was put back half an hour.

  “Oh I know all about that,” she said. “It’s the photographer’s assistant, isn’t it?”

  She hardly ever addressed small part actors by their names, but usually by the name of the role they were playing. “Well, he’s got an appendix, that’s what. You know the lines, dear, don’t you? There are only a couple anyway, and if you don’t know them you’ve got plenty of time to read them up before this evening. Hop off and see if his suit will fit you; if it doesn’t wear your own and carry his hat. Off you go. We’re up in a couple of hours.”

  Breathlessly I reported this news to my director, a red-haired young man in a wrap-around camel hair coat called Basil Dearden, who was assiduously modelling himself, with considerable success, on Basil Dean, a director noted for his brilliance, sarcasm, acidity, and apparent abhorrence of actors.

  “Christ Almighty!” he said. “Now I know there’s a war on: they’ve started to ration the Talent!” And to my eager face he quietly said, “Well, don’t stand there, piss off and see if the blasted things fit”, starting a deep friendship which only ended with his death more than thirty years later.

  J. B. Priestley’s “When We Are Married” brought me, with two thin lines, a few physical miles nearer to the West End. I don’t remember very much about it except that the suit did fit and that I spent over an hour making up and sitting in a real dressing-room with real lights and real actors all about me. I also had to call the Half, the Quarter, and the Acts. I felt as tinny as the Bishopbriggs clock. Too busy to be frightened, I did what I could and was allowed to stay on till the end of the Production. Quite suddenly, and as tiresomely simple as that, I became an actor proper. Although I still had the Gents and the Club Room and the errands to run for the other actors … but as the parts got larger, for they did as time went on, I gradually had to give up the other jobs and found that I was being paid seven and six to play quite large, for me at that time, roles. Young actors were getting hard to find easily. The war had netted quite a number already.

  “There’s a nice little part for you next week in ‘Saloon Bar’,” said Beattie one day. “You are a bit young for it but I think you’ll get away with it. Alf the Pot Boy. See what you can do.” I did. And enjoyed it thoroughly and made up my mind, halfway through the week, that I would go and ask Jack de Leon for a rise. After all, I reckoned, I was now an actor with a quite respectable line of roles behind me … a rise was not unreasonable. But on Saturday night, my pay packet had no jingly coins inside. In terror, in case it was my Notice or something, I ripped it open and a shilling fell out on to the floor. Anxiously I scrabbled in the little buff envelope. There was one green, crackly pound note. A guinea! I’d done it.

  I bought Vi a gin and lime, had a giddy whisky myself and crossed the dark street to the telephone box outside the Station. My father answered as he always did, “Bogaerde here.” I told him what had happened. “And next week there’s a better part in a better play and if I get it they’ll double the salary to two guineas.” There was a silence on the line, I heard the pips go and my father’s voice saying, “I suppose you realise that you have spent your profits. I’ll tell Mother. Ring off now. Very good.” And the line went dead. But I knew that he was impressed. He was also accurate in his accounting. No more gins and whiskies, nor did I telephone them again.

  The war didn’t end that Christmas as so many of us had hopefully predicted, and it seemed, from where I could see, that the German tanks were hardly cardboard, and for a nation on the very brink of starvation they were doing uncomfortably well. It was an ominous, dark, waiting time. For everyone. For me it meant that Call Up loomed nearer and nearer and the chances of my making my mark in my chosen profession began to look very shaky indeed. The war, I was sure, was going to go on for ages, at least until I was over twenty-one—which was the limit I had set myself for “success”. Not stardom, never that, but calm, assured, character-lead stuff. The kind of actor who is never out of work, always comfortably engaged, and always able to play almost any role within the wide range of Character. Never too many pressures, never too much splendour, nor too much responsibility. “Always Applauded” would suit me very well. And when Beattie gave me my first really big role, in a revival of Priestley’s “Cornelius”, I knew that I had found my exact position. Lawrence, the office boy, was what I wanted always to play. No play to “carry”, a good moment in each act—the perfect role. I enjoyed it, was good in it and liked very much the compliments which started to arrive from my fellow actors. On the last night I saw Beattie in the Club Room with her book of the week’s takings. “We had a good week,” she said. “Funny with a serious play. But we always do well with Priestley.” As Vi came out with us, pulling on her coat and getting her torch and gas mask ready I said to Beattie: “It was a marvellous week for me. I really feel now that I am a proper actor.” Beattie shot me a distant, flicker of a smile. “Do you, dear?” she said. “That’s nice.”

  We played one week at Q and then moved up north to the Embassy Theatre at Swiss Cottage and played a week there. They did an equal swap with us and so most plays had a good two weeks run before we had to start all over again. The Embassy was more of a theatre really than Q. It had a balcony and red plush and I had no responsibilities whatsoever back stage, so my week playing there, unless we were preparing the next production’s set, was pretty quiet; I only had the Shows to worry me. And “Cornelius” was, I thought, pretty well buttoned up.

  It was buttoned up. So was my acting career for the time being. Beattie informed me that there was nothing “for me” in the next three Productions but that I could carry on, if I wished, in the Gents, in the Scene Dock, and helping Vi in the Club Room. I was not over anxious. What to do? I needed advice rather quickly. Fortunately Bill Wightman had taken lodgings in a sombre yellow brick house not far away from the Embassy Theatre in Fellows Road. He was between jobs but offered me Ovaltine and chocolate digestive biscuits in his comfortable room overlooking the back gardens of Swiss Cottage. And copious advice. He agreed with me that it might be wiser to try and press ahead with the Theatre rather
than go back to the Gents and boiling glue and carrying trays to more fortunate players, and suggested, very mildly, that he knew of a woman who was running a Rep Company in the country and who might be willing to give me a job. She was, he said, finding it too much of a struggle to keep going, and that he and a friend were considering making an offer to purchase the place outright thus ensuring himself a permanent job and a permanent theatre. She had not definitely made up her mind to sell, and in the meantime she was short of a Juvenile. Perhaps I should go down and see her before I committed myself to Beattie and the Gents.

  The next day, after he had telephoned and made an appointment, I took the train down to Amersham in Buckinghamshire and went to meet Sally Latimer who looked at me doubtfully and asked if I could do an American accent. I lied and said yes. She asked me what else I could do, and misunderstanding her in my anxiousness, I said that I also painted sets and worked at Q and could wait at table. For twenty-two shillings a week I got the job, and as soon as “Cornelius” closed, at the end of the week, I told Beattie and waited for the storm. There was no storm from Beattie.

  “All right, dear, good luck. Remember, if you ever want to come back we’ll see what we can find for you. I’m busy now dear, so let me get on with it, will you?” and she continued checking the “pull” of a poster for the next production.

  It was a little over six years later that I took her up on her generous offer. On Demob leave, in my worn Service dress, a reasonable row of campaign medals on my chest, three pips on my shoulders and ten shillings in my pocket, I stood in a line of elderly women whom she was interviewing for Char Ladies. Nothing had changed, the same rubber floor, the same smell from my old Gents, the tatty silver and black paintwork, the faded stills from “Peg O’ My Heart” and “Abies Irish Rose” with Beattie in a bow and gingham. Nothing seemed to have altered at all since Arromanches, Arnhem, Berlin, Bombay, Singapore and Sourabaya. As I reached her, last in the line, she looked up pleasantly from her little note book.