A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  “Except you were rotten to me all the time.”

  “I was not! I liked you very much indeed.”

  “When you stuck the knife in me …”

  “Oh that…”

  “Well, I’ve still got the scar. Lally said it will show in an evening dress.”

  We wandered out of the damp studio into the clear hard light and, dodging under the branches, walked back to the house for lunch. I took her woolly hand and she looked at me with surprise. “I hope you don’t get killed, that’s all,” she said, “because when it’s all finished you might become a Film Star or something, like Lloyd Nolan or Robert Taylor and then I could come and live with you in Hollywood and we’d have real palm trees in the garden.”

  The idea suddenly cheered me up; she was being so silly that it almost made sense. I pushed her suddenly and she gave a scream and slithered about on the muddy path.

  “I hate you! What did you do that for when I was being so nice to you? I might have got this coat all mucky, and it’s my school one too … but you don’t care, oh no … you’re just vile.”

  We heard Elsie through the trees banging on a tin tray with a spoon to call us in for our meal, and Rogan our terrier came bounding up the path, tongue lolling, tail wagging. I put my arm round her neck and pulled her to me. “I’m sorry … I didn’t mean it… really. I was just suddenly feeling happy again.” She shrugged me off a bit, but not much and we walked on to the house. “It’s a funny way of showing it, that’s all I can say,” she said. “It’s stuffed cabbage today and there’s no H.P. sauce. Oh this war! It is a bit of a nuisance.”

  At the final run through before the dress rehearsal we heard the stick of bombs ripping down somewhere behind the theatre across St Martin’s Lane. The final one, we felt sure, would hit us; on hands and knees under the Stalls we heard it, with gratitude, crash into the Hippodrome opposite. The lights flicked and went on again, we scrambled up from our graceless positions, Miss Evans straightened her hat and Peter raised his hands to catch a small disc of paper which came gently eddying down through the dusty air. He read it out aloud. “Do Not Accept This Programme Unless The Seal Is Unbroken.” We all laughed stupidly and the rehearsal finished. Tony Forwood, who was attending this performance before he moved, the next day, to Yeovil, suggested that we all clear off and find shelter somewhere, and that if anyone wanted a lift he had a car outside and enough petrol. Miss Evans said she’d like a lift to Albany where she had a flat and we left the theatre to enter an inferno in Charing Cross Road. The whole world seemed to be on fire, the sky crimson, dust and smoke like a thick fog, the glass canopy round the theatre shattered into inch long splinters, rubble, broken branches and fire hoses everywhere. The Hippodrome was burning fiercely, people cursing, coughing and running, wires looped across the street and everywhere belching heat and smoke. Five of us piled into the miraculously untouched car standing by the curb, but by the time we had bounced and bumped to Leicester Square, past the ruins of the Café Anglais and the flaming roof of the Leicester Square Theatre, we knew that we were stuck. Wally suddenly remembered that there was a small Afternoon Drinking Club not far away in Orange Street, and rather than be buried alive in Tony’s soft-top Mercedes, it was suggested that we make for its shelter. He was, he said, a member.

  Streaked with dust and flakes of oily soot we clambered up a couple of flights to a discreet polished door, and were admitted, resentfully, into the calm of a dimly lit room. A thick carpet, a small bar in one corner, a white baby grand in the other. Soft, warm, safe. A pale young man in a blue angora sweater was playing “Our Love Affair”—he looked up with polite surprise but went on, his identity bracelets gleaming softly. At the bar, brushing down the dust and bits of glass, Miss Evans ordered an Orange Juice from the slender bar man with a sun-tanned face. The rest of us had something stronger and the young man at the piano rippled into “Run Rabbit Run” defiantly. Bombs fell intermittendy, shaking the room, making a glass tank of wax lilies jerk and wobble in the blast. Eventually Miss Evans decided that she must, simply must, get back to Albany, which was, as she pointed out “just down the road” and that she would walk since no traffic could move in Piccadilly. We went with her offering company in one form or another all of which she firmly refused, and the last we saw of her was her tall, determined figure, walking swiftly down the crimson street, until the swirling smoke and dust hid her from sight. She was back the next morning on the dot and “Diversion” opened to a packed house and great acclaim. Apart from the Windmill up the road, we were the only theatre open for business in London.

  Dressing-room number four at Wyndhams was hardly palatial, but Peter and I settled down, one on each side, and started a small salon. Rather he did. I was far too timid. He had vast energy which astonished and embarrassed me, and although he had two numbers of his own in the show, as well as doing all the bits and pieces as I did, he still found the time to write another play which he handed, sheet by sheet, to an enraptured Joyce Grenfell who sat at his feet on the cramped floor in blue velvet. People were always dropping in to see him, to talk in varied languages, argue and drink tea. It was all very Russian. Vida brought lunch from the pub next door and we had picnics which seemed to last most of the day. We were in the theatre most of the time anyway: two shows daily, three on matinees, all gauged exactly so that the audiences were well away by the time the Warning went, which it did regularly every evening between five-thirty and six. If it was hard and tiring I never knew. I was far too busy and far too happy. Although I had nothing much to do, a few lines here and there and the tag line of a not very good sketch, my days seemed filled to bursting, I was in euphoria. It came as something of a shock, therefore, one day to receive my Medical Exam Papers and a command to report at some obscure address in Brighton. A sorry undignified affair in a converted shop off North Street. Naked and ashamed, we shuffled along in a smelly line before white-coated, weary Doctors who prodded, lifted, and pressed various parts of our flinching bodies and passed us fit for duty. In one of the cheap restaurants where I cleared the tables, I had heard rumours from some of the Actors who made up most of the clientele, that the best thing to do before a medical was to drink endless cups of black coffee an hour before, thus increasing one’s heartbeat, or else to swallow castor oil mixed with a certain amount of soot, which would make one cough and leave a warning sediment in the lungs for the X-rays. Neither suggestion seemed to me to be worth the risk, so I didn’t bother. But that morning in Brighton in the cold, stone-floored shop, I almost wished that I had heeded my advisers. Too late. I was fit and well and returned to the show chastened but healthy.

  Peter’s energy being almost limitless, he also did an act in the evenings after our shows were over at a small cellar night club called “The Nightlight” opposite the stage door of the Hippodrome. He suggested that as I found the evenings boring and dull, since the final curtain was at 5.30, I should try for an audition and get together an act for the Club. This would add to my earnings and be good experience. With a sudden spurt of imagination or something, I wrote a pretty dire monologue based on the character I had played in “Cornelius”, called “Lawrence”. In a battered felt hat, a draggly rain coat and a tartan scarf I presented myself for my audition one morning in the empty club. It is well known that a Night Club in the morning is as near Hell as one can possibly imagine: illusions are stripped away, the sheer tattiness and ugliness of everything is laid bare. Standing on the minute stage, in my uninspired costume I went through my hastily written, hastily learned, act. I was supposed to be an Electrical Addict and did the whole monologue holding two bits of flex. The trick, if that is the word, was that at the end I put them together and blacked out the house. To immense applause, I hoped.

  It must have been a pretty tough time for the Nightlight because I passed, and opened there two evenings later on a bill with Peter Ustinov, Ord Hamilton, and a Hungarian lady who sang a song about a “Teenie Weenie Martinee”. … I got paid five pounds a week. Life, apart from
the Medical and the Bombs, was looking very rosy indeed.

  The Nightlight was nearly always filled. It was a dark, low room below two shops, down a single winding staircase, and after the Café de Paris got hit it was closed because of the dangers it held. One bomb on the Nightlight and everyone would have perished. But while it lasted, so did I. And “Lawrence” got polished and embellished with every exposure. Not always for his own good. Tony Forwood was delighted at my enterprise, shattered by my performance, but put it all down, charitably, to Good Experience and refused all percentages until After The War. Which from where I was standing seemed to be getting longer and longer and must surely engulf me. Which it did. One morning Peter and I, both the same age and both in the same Initial Category, went down to Charing Cross and signed up. It was a daunting moment for us both, only very slightly lightened by the fact that when we got back to the Theatre we were treated as if we had just relieved Mafeking and Vida had brought a bottle of champagne. The pleasure was increased, a few days later, by the news that we were both to be Deferred for three months because we were in the show and were helping to boost Morale. Which made me, at any rate, feel excessively important. However, May was not all that far away … and in one degree I was almost glad at last to know that I had to go. Everyone it seemed was in Uniform. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable and out of place in civilian clothes. A very earnest actor suggested one evening at The Nightlight that I should become a Conscientious Objector, and gave me a pile of leaflets explaining the facts. The idea of digging ditches in Scotland, of all places, of becoming a Stretcher Bearer or working for the Forestry Commission and allowing the Germans to rape my sister horrified me, and I settled for the idea of a short, undemanding, anonymous, career in the Army. The shorter the better. Preferably in the Cook House.

  “You mustn’t give things up, you know, ducky, when you get in,” said Vida one evening in the kitchen of the little flat in Belsize Crescent where she lived with a girl friend and sometimes cooked me a meal after the shows. “You must go on writing and drawing, however difficult it may be. Write anywhere … you can always take a bit of paper and a pencil with you: don’t just flop about cleaning your equipment or whatever they do in their free time… you must keep your mind going.” She bounced two fried slices of Spam and some potatoes on to a plate and set them before me. “And start with poetry … men always do in the Army, it makes them very emotional and odd. Some of the best poetry was written in wartime you know.”

  I remembered, glumly, Brooke, Blunden, Sassoon and all the others whose works I had learned by heart during my “reincarnation” period and wondered how on earth I could ever approach such standards, and what horrors and fears I must endure in order to commit them to paper. And, as I pointed out, I felt that I would have to have someone to write to, or for… I could not envisage just writing for myself.

  “Well! Write to me,” she said. “Write everything to me. I’d love it, you know that: I’d try and help you, criticise, you know … I used to be in Copywriting so I know a bit about words. Not much but something. Send me your first poem. Make it a promise now and write everything and anything which comes into your head. But put it down, ducky, get it out. Don’t let it rot there… I know you, you’re terribly lazy unless you have the incentive … well, it’s easy. I’ll be the incentive, you see.”

  Walking down to Fellows Road after supper I knew that what she had said was true, and that I would try to follow her advice: I would take note books and pencils and some paints perhaps when the time came. And I’d try and join a Concert Party … she said they always had Concert Parties and that they would welcome a professional with open arms … if there wasn’t one perhaps I could start one … first a sort of Revue … songs and sketches, that sort of thing, then later maybe a simple play. Which I would direct, naturally, and Star in. Thinking in this manner I felt very cheered up. The future didn’t seem so daunting with these possibilities ahead and she had very generously given me herself as my Incentive, and although a raid was in progress during my long walk back, and the air lethal with red hot fragments from the Ack Ack guns on Primrose Hill, I felt happy and sure again, and protected, for she had also very thoughtfully provided me with her umbrella.

  On April the 14th I left Wyndhams with Peter: our Deferment was almost up, and they had to train replacements for the show. The whole cast signed our programmes as a souvenir, and I left the theatre with a heavy heart to the strains of the Opening Number as a thin youth leaped about in my place showing signs of being far better than I had. It rose somewhat when Miss Hanney said that a Miss Deans had telephoned and would I call her back urgently the moment I got in. Annie was at Drury Lane which was the Headquarters of ENSA. She said that there was a part going in a new tour of “The Ghost Train” and if I was out of “Diversion” why didn’t I come along and try? If I was in ENSA, she reasoned, I would almost automatically be Deferred again and this could go on for as long as the tour lasted, which was for six months at least, by which time the war was bound to be over and I needn’t go. It was very persuasive. Especially as I was free, miserable and at a loose end. A couple of days later I attended a slim Audition on the stage at Drury Lane and got the part of the Juvenile with Arnold Ridley directing his own production. But I was not a good choice, and it was not the happiest of times. Cold dreary barns of theatres, long bus journeys in rain and fog, miserable hostels and endless stations. I felt even guiltier playing to uniformed troops than I had felt walking the streets of London, and by the time we got to Amesbury I welcomed the telephone call from my father, to say that I was requested to report for Military Service at Catterick Camp, Yorkshire, on May the 4th next. I wanted no further deferments. When the final curtain came down, for me, on my last performance in “The Ghost Train” I felt a surge of joy. Someone had made a decision for me; I’d do just what I was told from now on in … until it was over.

  Gareth said he wanted a German helmet or a coconut, depending on where I got sent. My father said that for at least twenty weeks the nearest I would get to Action of any kind would be the barrack square or assault courses on the moors. The best I’d be able to send him would be a bunch of heather or, at worst, a picture postcard of Darlington.

  He was slightly amused that I had been sent to a Signals Unit. I was amazed. “What did you put on your form when you signed up? I mean you don t know a flag from a cat’s whisker! You can’t even get the Home Service on the wireless. I really can’t see you tapping away at Morse Code.”

  “I just put ‘Actor’ down where it said ‘Profession’ and then the schools where it said ‘Education’…”

  “Which you hardly had.”

  “Well… I don’t know why they sent me to a Signals Unit any more than you do. I’m told the Army is a bit funny in that sort of way.”

  It was decided that, very probably, the Glasgow Technical School had tipped the scale in my favour away from the ignominious Infantry into something a little more Specialised.

  “Will you try for a commission, if they ask you?” said my father, pouring the wine for my last family dinner. “I believe it is not very fashionable among people of your age today … the Class thing?”

  “I’ll try. I mean I’d like to. It’s a bit more comfortable, isn’t it…”

  He folded his napkin and slid it into a silver ring. “That depends. Not always. It carries a good deal of responsibility. You don’t come first, you realise, the men under you do. Your troop or platoon or whatever it is … and I never thought that you particularly cared for responsibility … actors don’t very much, do they?” He was not being in the least unkind. Accurate. I had to agree: but assured him that a new life lay before me, and that the two years which had passed so swiftly and so filled with experiences, had opened my eyes. I would make a very determined effort to succeed somehow, whatever I had to do. I would treat the whole operation exactly as I had tried to treat the Theatre … with auditions, energy, elbowing and climbing; it wasn’t so very different. The survival of t
he fittest, as with beasts, and I’d try to survive.

  Strangely enough on that final evening, I really didn’t think it was going to be all that difficult. One chapter had closed at Amesbury, another was about to open. I was, I felt, quite ready. He didn’t seem as sure but on the other hand was happy that I had decided not to be a Conchie, as he called them, and agreed with me that with determination, hard work and a good deal of luck, anything was possible. Even an unlikely commission. I said that those were the Theatre rules. He smiled, shook his head and rang the little bell for Elsie.

  We went down to the pond with the last of the wine and our glasses. It was a still, warm evening, even though it was yet so very early in the year. May bugs skimmed the surface of the water, bumping and zig zagging over the tightly closed waterlily buds which, I suddenly realised with a sharp thrust of regret, I would not see in flower, for the next time I came home it would be winter. My mother sat on the swinging hammock, a jacket about her shoulders, sewing a button, or something, on one of Gareth’s shirts. The rusty springs creaked as she moved gently back and forwards. Across the pond, rustling about in the new spring sedge, my sister hunted for a beast with Rogan, his tail wagging, feet splashing in and out of the water. Ripples bobbled the lily buds and we could hear her voice clear across the soft evening air: “Ratty! Where’s Ratty! Seek the rat, seek him …”

  It was infinitely peaceful, safe, impossible to believe that at this very hour tomorrow I would be hundreds of miles away starting the process of becoming a soldier and melting my identity into a Mass. This I firmly resolved, there and then by the pond, never to do. I would keep all that these people, this place, the Cottage. Lally, and all the rest had given me, and I’d never let any of them go. They would be my salvation and my comfort if, and when, things got too hard.

  My father spun his cigarette butt out across the pond. A tiny, glowing ember, arking in the dusk, a final second before extinction in the rushes.