Not knowing what to do I decided – after much thought, I may say – that I would ask Mr. and Mrs. Hardy for their advice. I didn’t want to mention it when any of the other Players were nearby, in case they thought me big-headed, and so I waited until I was next invited to tea, and then cautiously brought the conversation round to my question. Mrs. Hardy immediately exclaimed, ‘What a lovely idea!’, but Mr. Hardy said nothing for a moment. When he was thinking hard about something his eyes took on a particular expression, and I could see him turning the idea in his mind. Eventually he said that, while he wouldn’t advise anyone to go on the stage when acting was such an uncertain way of life, nor would he advise anyone against it. If everyone were discouraged by the difficulties, there would be no actors or actresses and all the theatres would have to close down. He also pointed out that it would involve me living in London, and he wondered what I would feel about that. I replied that if I were able to act, I could live anywhere, which was what I did feel – the idea of acting was so important to me. Mrs. Hardy was much more enthusiastic, and immediately said that I needed some famous playwright to write a part for me in his next play, to launch me on the stage. I remember her word ‘launch’ – as if I was a ship. ‘What about Barrie?’ she said. ‘He could do it.’ – ‘Barrie?’ said Mr. Hardy, plainly surprised. – ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Hardy said, ‘I am sure he would, if you were to ask him.’
The conversation didn’t go any further, and it wasn’t until later I realised they were talking about Sir James Barrie, the author of ‘Peter Pan’, but I did feel very encouraged, and very grateful to Mrs. Hardy. She instigated the whole thing; that’s what makes later events so inexplicable.
The idea of my pursuing a stage career was complicated by the fact of Ernest, if I can put it like that. He was my cousin. We met by chance one market day in Dorchester when it was pelting with rain and I was sheltering in the doorway of a jewellery shop. The road was like a river, and people were running for cover, and he dived into the doorway. I hadn’t seen him for years. When I was a little girl I used to meet him occasionally at family gatherings, but he was nine years older than I was and always seemed very grown-up. During the War he had been away with the Dorset Regiment, and then in the Indian Army, and he had only lately come back to England. He was very handsome, or at least I thought so. He had dark hair and warm eyes, and his complexion was still slightly sunburnt. We talked and got on very well, and soon after that we began courting. He worked with his father, who ran a butcher’s shop in the middle of Beaminster, but sometimes he could get away late on a Saturday, and then we either went to the pictures, or to a dance. Ernest wasn’t a very good dancer – he trod on my feet more than once or twice, and I had to do most of the steering, which earned us a few black looks from some of the other couples – but he learnt quickly. On Sundays, if the weather was kind, we used to go on walks. We would stroll along the river towards the great house at Kingston; this is the most gentle walk, and very lovely in spring and early summer. We also explored further afield. Ernest would borrow my father’s bicycle, and we would cycle out of the town, and sometimes our route took us up the hill and past the Hardys’ house, and I used to ride slowly in the hope that I might see them out for a walk. One day we stopped by the brick wall that runs round the house, and Ernest lifted me up so that I could look over the wall, and I saw someone walking across one of the lawns, but it may have been the gardener. I ducked down very quickly. It would have been so embarrassing if either Mr. or Mrs. Hardy had seen me peering in!
I have to confess that, at the start, I was fairly sure that I didn’t want to marry Ernest! Maybe that’s wrong; he was very handsome, as I say, and I did like him very much, but liking someone isn’t the same as loving them, and I was frightened by the thought of marrying the wrong man. Here I know I was very strongly influenced by Mr. Hardy’s novels, which are full of misconceived alliances, you know, the husband and wife fall out of love, if they were in love in the first place (which they often are not, even when they think they are), and are condemned to live in domestic misery for the rest of their lives. To marry the wrong person, to marry without love, I thought, would be a terrible fate; better not to marry at all.
The character in my head that summer, the first summer we were courting, was Eustacia from ‘The Return of the Native’ – I had long dark hair like her, and I too was emotional and impetuous, and I am sure that I began to read my own life as a version of her life. Eustacia’s great mistake, given her restless character, is that she chooses a man who has come back to settle in the countryside after living in Paris, and I couldn’t avoid thinking that Ernest, too, had come back to settle in Dorset after years away. I remember asking myself whether I really wanted to marry a local man, a cousin. Did I want to spend my life in Beaminster? Beaminster is such a small gossipy place. Although it calls itself a town it’s not really much more than a large village. I’ve come to like it, as one does – one makes the best of things – but at that time the thought of spending the rest of my life there horrified me.
I also knew that if I went to live there it would be very difficult to do any acting, even in Dorchester, never mind London. But my mother and father were very keen on Ernest. During the War he had won the Military Cross, which was quite something, and they liked the fact that he was my cousin; if he and I married, they thought, it would help bring the Beaminster and Dorchester sides of the Bugler family closer together. We’d only been courting for a few weeks when my mother started trying to find out whether he had proposed, and telling me that I didn’t want to be left on the shelf. She said that it wasn’t fair of me to string Ernest along if I wasn’t serious. In hindsight it seems funny but at the time as you can imagine it drove me mad, not least because he hadn’t proposed! So I could hardly be accused of stringing him along.
I remember when I thought he was about to propose. We were in a café in the middle of Dorchester when he pulled a little box from his pocket, and more or less chucked it at me across the table. I was convinced it was going to be an engagement ring and then I opened it and it turned out to contain his medal! It had a purple and white ribbon attached to it. Heaven knows what my face looked like, and what I’d have said if it had been a ring I have no idea.
Still, that was when I finally managed to get him to tell me why he’d been awarded the MC. He’d always put me off before. ‘You don’t want to know, Gertie,’ he’d say, ‘it’s just a bit of tin, it doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t do anything that much. It’s in the past, it’s finished with, forget it.’ That was what Ernest always felt; the past was past.
He’d been out on the North West Frontier, on the border with Afghanistan. He and his company had been sent there to safeguard the border, and they were ordered to take control of a particular mountain ridge. It was called Stonehenge Ridge, oddly enough. I asked Ernest if it looked like Stonehenge and he said, not at all, except that it was covered in boulders. As there was no proper cover, trying to capture the ridge from the Afghans was a fairly hopeless idea, and all of them knew that, and nobody wanted to fight. However, they set off before dawn; in his company there were about three hundred Sikh soldiers and twenty-five officers, half of them British, the rest Sikhs. As soon as they came within range of the Afghans they started taking casualties, Ernest said – the Afghans weren’t very heavily armed, but they knew how to shoot straight. He was awarded the medal because, under heavy fire, he had helped rescue a number of men who’d been wounded. Two of his fellow British officers – one a good friend – had died, and he felt the whole affair had been a waste of time. That was why he was so reluctant to tell me about it. He felt it was best if he kept it to himself.
‘So you could have been killed?’ I said. – ‘I might have been,’ he said with a smile, ‘but I wasn’t.’
By then I’d realised that Ernest was quite shy and not that certain over what to do next. When he’d been in India, he said, he’d always pictured Beaminster as home, he’d longed to be back, but now he was there, i
t was like being a child again. Beaminster was full of Buglers – aunts, uncles, grandparents, first cousins, second cousins. I remember saying to him: ‘I’m your cousin!’ and he said, ‘Oh, you’re different!’ and we both laughed. But half the time he felt that he hadn’t grown up. He was thirty-two, after all – much older than I was.
What he hated, dear old Ernest, was being a butcher. He used to say that he liked animals when they were alive but not when they were dead. So it was difficult for him, and one Sunday afternoon he was really down in the dumps. It ought to have been spring, or nearly spring, but the weather was miserable, cold and wet; all weekend it had rained non-stop. There were daffodils out round the town but they were spattered with mud. We’d tried going for a walk and had given up, and now we were standing on the station platform, waiting for the train, waiting to say good-bye to each other for the week, and he began to talk about his relations with his father. ‘We get on well enough, but working in the shop with him, day in day out, it’s a strain,’ he said. ‘He can’t help it, it’s not his fault. He still thinks I’m eighteen. He’s in charge. I had enough of being ordered around in the Army.’ I put my arm through his and tightened it. ‘What’s brought this on?’ I said, and he said he knew he didn’t want to be a butcher for the rest of his life, but he couldn’t think how else to earn a living, and so we began to talk about the future, and I realised we were talking not only about his future but also mine. ‘Would you go back in the Army?’ I said. – ‘God, no,’ he said. ‘No, I was thinking I might have a go at farming.’ I asked him where and he said Devon. Land was relatively cheap, and if he borrowed from the bank, he might be able to buy a small farm; fifty acres would be enough to start with. The trouble was, this was the nineteen twenties, a very bad time for agriculture, when almost all farmers seemed to be doing very badly. I knew that he wanted my opinion, and I said that I thought things were bound to get better eventually, but, if he wanted to be prudent, he could rent some land, and see how things went, and in time he could get a proper farm. That was how we left it, because we could hear the train on its way. You could always hear the chugging of the train before you saw the train itself.
The idea of being a farmer’s wife was very attractive to me, and when he proposed, a few weeks later, I accepted him at once. By this time I was very busy again with the Hardy Players. We were doing ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, and as I’d hoped, I was playing the part of Bathsheba, the heroine, and I loved it. I found her a very sympathetic character. She is emotional like Eustacia, but less of a schemer, and she also happens to end up happily married to Gabriel Oak, who is a farmer! I don’t know how important that really was but, as I say, I did have a habit of reading my own life through novels and it did cross my mind that I was almost exactly the same age as Bathsheba. Ernest timed it nicely: he finally got round to proposing about half an hour after the end of the last performance, back-stage, when I was still dressed as Bathsheba. He did it very romantically (I’m not saying how). It felt as if there was some sort of Fate about it all.
The wedding was in September, at Stinsford Church. Several people have asked if we chose to be married there because of Mr. Hardy, but it wasn’t that; it was simply that we liked the church so much. Neither of us realised that he had so many associations with it. However, some weeks before the service, when the banns were published, we walked round the churchyard and found ourselves by a big old yew tree, staring not only at his first wife’s grave, but also at the graves of his mother and father, and his grandparents; and I did wonder if we should invite him and Mrs. Hardy to the wedding. All the Hardy Players had been invited. However, there were already a lot of guests, and Ernest was a bit doubtful, and so we decided not to invite them. I regret it now: I should have liked him there. Whether he would have come if we’d invited him, I can’t say.
When it came to the marriage form, Ernest insisted on putting down his occupation not as ‘butcher’ but as ‘farmer’, which was a statement of intentions as much as anything. ‘I’m not a butcher – it’s just temporary,’ he said. ‘I’m already a farmer; that’s how I feel.’ The Reverend Cowley, who married us, didn’t say anything to object. After the wedding we had a lovely week on the Isle of Wight, and then moved into a little cottage in Beaminster, on Prout Hill. That was a big change for me. A big change! There was no electricity supply, so we had to use oil lamps and candles. It was like living back in the middle of the nineteenth century! And it always seemed to rain a lot. Beaminster is a very rainy place, much more than Dorchester; I don’t know why that should be the case, but it is. Other people have remarked on it. And, of course, I was living away from my family. It was a big change. We didn’t have much money and I had no help with housework, and I felt quite isolated. I couldn’t drive – I’ve never learned to drive – and in those days there was no direct bus service between the two towns, so to get from Beaminster to Dorchester by public transport one first of all had to catch a bus to Bridport and then a train to Maiden Newton, and then wait half an hour for the connecting train to Dorchester. The journey took nearly two and a half hours!
In getting married I hadn’t given up my acting ambitions, or not entirely. Ernest and I had talked about it and he was all for me continuing to act with the Players. As things turned out, the year after we were married I became pregnant, and of course, that meant I couldn’t possibly do any acting. I remember writing to Mr. Tilley to say as much, and I had a lovely letter back, in which he congratulated me and said that there was nothing more important than having a baby. In his letter he did also say that he knew Mr. Hardy would very much like to see me if I happened to be in Dorchester, and that was the start of all the difficulties that I had with Mrs. Hardy.
It was a summer’s day – late summer, I think. I’d left home early so that I should be back in good time to make Ernest’s tea, and all the connections worked well, so I was in Dorchester by eleven o’clock, and I walked up the hill to the house. By the time I got there I was feeling quite tired, and I was very much looking forward to sitting down. I rang the bell, and the maid answered, and I said I had come to see Mr. Hardy – she asked me if I had an appointment and I said I had been asked to call, and then she went indoors, and then Mrs. Hardy appeared. I was immediately struck by how unwell she looked; that is to say, she always looked less than well, but now she seemed quite ill. Her face was very pale, and she had dark patches under her eyes. She reminded me of a lemur. She was very cold and hostile. She told me that Mr. Hardy always worked in the mornings, and could not possibly be disturbed. Well, obviously I didn’t want to disturb him at his work, but I had come all the way from Beaminster, and so I asked whether it would be more convenient if I came back in the afternoon. She then said – I remember this very clearly – that it would not be more convenient, that he could not receive uninvited visitors, and anyone wishing to see him had to make an appointment with her.
It was her tone that shocked me more than anything else; I felt as if she was treating me as a complete stranger. And she must have been able to see that I was pregnant; that was obvious to anyone, because my stomach was a big bump! I was completely thrown. I think I asked her to tell Mr. Hardy that I had called – because I didn’t want to seem discourteous to him – and on that note I left, wondering how on earth I had offended her. I could think of nothing that I might have done. A letter arrived the next day, in a cream envelope. She must have written it almost as soon as I’d left. It was written on headed notepaper, and it was very long and unpleasant. It accused me of not knowing how to behave properly. Several sentences stick in my mind, even now; one was that ‘all invitations naturally come from me, as is the custom’ and that it was ‘not usual in our station of life for any lady to call upon a gentleman’. She also accused me, in so many words, of making up the story that Mr. Hardy had asked me to call. I showed it to Ernest, and when he read that phrase ‘our station in life’ he said that it showed what a snob she was. ‘You’ve rubbed her up the wrong way, the old witch,’ he said
. I am afraid we often called her ‘the old witch’ after that.
Ernest’s advice was that I should forget about it, but the more I read the letter, the nastier it seemed. The tone was so unpleasant, and the idea that I might have lied to her made me angry, so I wrote back, and a few days later she wrote back again, another, even longer letter, in which she now tried to make out that there had been some misunderstanding, and offered various excuses for dismissing me as she had. She blamed her nerves, and some piece of news she had had. However, she still refused to accept that I had been asked to call on Mr. Hardy – instead of saying that I had made it up, she now suggested that I had remembered incorrectly!
To be honest, the whole affair left a bad taste in my mouth. It did make me feel very wary of her. And it came in the middle of all sorts of other things. I had a very difficult pregnancy, I became anaemic, and then something else happened. As a sideline Ernest had started renting three small fields on the edge of Beaminster, which he stocked with some cattle that he had bought at market, and during the day I would walk up to the fields to check that they were doing all right. One afternoon a big bullock barged into me and knocked me over, knocked me down in the mud, and I was very shaken by that. I wasn’t trampled or anything, but I fell awkwardly. I felt very sick. Not long after, I went back to live with my parents in Dorchester, thinking that it would be better to have the baby there with my mother at hand, and the baby was still-born. He was a boy. The nurses tried to take him away before I could see him, but I made them give him to me, and everything about him looked so perfect: his head, his hands and feet and toes and ears. It was very hard. It upsets me even now, after all these years. Whether losing him had anything to do with being knocked over I don’t know; everyone said that couldn’t have made any difference, but I’ve always wondered.
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