by Sue Johnston
Around that time I met a very lovely Swiss boy who came to the theatre as part of a touring group. He was the stage manager. In the two weeks that he was there we fell in love in that totally committed, nothing else to worry about way that only young people can. We’d spend the entire time together gazing into one another’s eyes. When he returned to Zurich I thought my heart would break. However, he then wrote a very proper letter to my mother and father, care of the theatre, asking if I might be permitted to visit him in Switzerland. We corresponded for some time, but I never did visit him. My mother must have been very impressed by this young man’s manners because his letter was another thing I found that she had kept.
Duncan Weldon, the now hugely successful West End producer, was running the Salford Players and he decided to come to Pilkington’s theatre for a season away from Salford. He’d previously seen me perform, and it was during his time here that he offered me a job. I would be working in weekly rep as an ASM – acting stage manager. This would mean working full-time at the theatre. ASM would have been better titled ADB, acting dogsbody! There was a lot of running around involved, but I loved it because, just like when I was working in the NEMS office, I was in the thick of it all. I saw this as a great opportunity so again I gave up a secure job and off I went. I got six pounds a week and paid ten bob on my national insurance stamp. My other job was eleven pounds a week so it was a big cut in wages, something that greatly worried my parents. Also, it was only for three months so there was no future in it – a thing that would make anyone’s blood run cold in the early sixties, especially my poor despairing mum and dad. Somehow they managed to grin and bear it. The job was hard work; we were performing one show while simultaneously rehearsing another. From the moment I opened my eyes till I fell back in bed at the end of the day I was working, and it felt great.
At this time, people in the theatre company began to push me to look into going to drama school. A lady called Nelly said to me, ‘Now, love, you’re a big fish in a small pond here. It’s time to go and be a little fish in a big pond.’ She knew that if I was going to pursue acting seriously I needed to learn more about how to act, rather than getting up onstage and hoping my personality would see me through. At the time, the only drama school I had heard of was RADA, and that seemed so posh and unattainable for someone from my background that I didn’t think I could apply there. However, I recalled that one of the girls from the course at the Liverpool Institute had applied to a place called Webber Douglas in London and had got in, so I decided to apply there.
My dad didn’t want to know and refused to even speak about it but my mother, surprisingly, was very supportive and she took me to a women’s wear shop where we got things on tick and bought me two outfits for my auditions. This really stands out in my mind, as it was so rarely the case that my mother would be the one on my side while my father was the one who voiced his disapproval. He was very upset by my decision.
I recall being on the train to London in the pink outfit that Mum had purchased for me and feeling like the bee’s knees. I had two speeches that I had learned by heart, a modern piece and a Shakespearian passage. For some unknown reason I decided on the way there that I was going to scrap the modern piece and learn something else. I arrived at Webber Douglas a bag of nerves, shaking like a leaf in front of a stony-faced panel, but I gave the audition my best shot.
‘Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself?’ I began.
I could hear my accent reverberating around the room. I sounded like Cilla Black! Lord only knows what they made of me. I was terribly nervous waiting for their verdict but I got in! Probably by the skin of my teeth but I was in all the same.
When I returned home really excited by my news I thought that Dad would come round quickly and be pleased for me too, but he didn’t. In fact, my dad was so angry that he refused to sign the forms for my grant, which was necessary for me to attend the school. I think my dad was fearful of the unknown, and for the three of us London was most definitely the unknown. My mother signed the papers, even though she also wasn’t too happy about me moving all the way to London. From then on, my dad’s anger was directed at my poor mother and she was given the silent treatment.
Years later my dad admitted that he was angry because I just seemed to flit from one thing to another. ‘You just get so fixated on things,’ he said, ‘and then you go cold on the idea and move on to the next. I thought you were going to go the same way with acting.’
This was true of me when I was at school, I did throw myself totally into something new, only to get bored of it quickly and try something else, but I think it’s fair to say that acting is something I’ve stuck with.
After much digging in of heels it became clear that I was definitely going to London. My dad finally relented but he still wasn’t happy and insisted that I stay in an all girls’ lodging house, which of course was also what my mother wanted.
*
When we first arrived at the hostel in Earl’s Court that would be my home for six long weeks, the woman who ran it looked us over and was friendly enough to me and my mother. But she eyed my father and said, ‘Men are not allowed over the threshold.’ Poor Dad had to wait in the car. My mother on the other hand was much comforted by this woman’s draconian approach.
I always find it strange how people can change mood or allegiance at the flick of a switch and usually with my mother you knew exactly where you were, as disapproval was her default position. However, since she had been so good in buying clothes for me and signing my papers, I thought that maybe we had reached a turning point. She would be happy for me to be in London pursuing acting as a career.
I was wrong. My mother looked around the room, her eyes brimming with tears, before saying, ‘My life has ended now.’
I couldn’t believe she’d said this. That she didn’t want me to be in London; she wanted me at home with her. It is sad to think that she found it so difficult to let go of me, and for a long time I was very upset with her for saying this.
My parents said their goodbyes and went on the fivehour journey back to the North-West. I was left in a shared room with a glamorous art student and a young Australian girl who was working in the City. The room was the size of an average double room but in it were squashed three single beds, three bedside lockers, three wardrobes and a sink. The art student kept herself to herself but the Australian would bound across my bed every night like a mountain goat when she returned from her evening follies, crushing my legs. I would politely lie there, wide awake, pretending to be asleep.
Outside our room was a Baby Belling – a hotplate contraption that was a mainstay of cheap bedsit living at the time. There was a meter at the side of the oven and I duly put my sixpence in on that first evening there. I was having a boiled egg, such was the glamour of my first night in London. I wandered off for a few minutes and returned only to find a plethora of pans placed strategically on the hotplate to get the most of this free opportunity. Where was my pan? Pushed to the back, nowhere near the heat. Raw egg for tea. From then on, when I put money in the meter I would watch that Baby Belling like a hawk. Depressingly, it was the same story for the bathroom. Sixpence in the meter and you were given a few inches of hot water, hardly enough to wet your feet. The taps were held together with tights, and then if you left the bathroom for any reason someone would run in and steal your water. If it’s a pretty depressing picture I’m painting then that’s because it was. It was miserable and I vowed to get out of there as quickly as I could.
After six weeks at college I had begun to make some good friends and two guys on my course told me of a room in their shared house in Notting Hill. I was delighted to be seeing the back of my nocturnal Aussie roommate and the Baby Belling, not to mention the tap tights. When they offered to help me move out I readily accepted. I let the lads in and I bounded up the stairs to get my stuff for them to carry. As they were making their way up behind me I heard an almighty scream – it was the landlady. Some men had crossed th
e threshold! She pounced on the boys and hurled them out into the street, leaving me to lug my own belongings down the stairs.
From then on things definitely got a lot better for me. My grant arrived, my living situation had improved and my homesickness had subsided. Notting Hill was in the heart of trendy London and I loved every minute of it.
*
The college itself, Webber Douglas, was in South Kensington, a very well-heeled part of London, in a beautiful old building. It was much smaller than I’d imagined it would be, more intimate, and I suppose that was a good thing – I may have been daunted by a huge acting establishment. It was full of extremely beautiful people. There were lots of blond girls with flowing hair who were like stick insects with impeccable diction. I have to be honest and admit that it was such an alien environment to me that it silenced me for the first week. A week may not seem like a long time but that first week away from home, feeling so cowed by my peers that I couldn’t even open my mouth, I felt every minute. I felt my accent was so northern that I didn’t dare speak. I went to classes and was asked to dance – something I dread to this day – and felt clumsy alongside those gazelle-like creatures. I would be asked to read and I would burn with embarrassment at anyone hearing my accent. I really did suffer from an inferiority complex about my background, but in those days I think most people from working-class stock thrust into a middle-class environment felt similarly to me.
Once I began to settle in and became familiar with my surrounds I realised there was a slight malaise about the place. A lot of the students weren’t taking the course seriously – for them, it was just a stopgap between school and the real world or finding a husband and settling down. Back then drama school was often treated by the middle and upper classes as a bit of a finishing school. The principal of the college had been there for years and I felt that his methods were stuck somewhere back when time forgot. But he was about to retire and everything was about to change.
A new principal came in, a man called Ralph Jago. At the same time I was beginning to make friends: there was Mike, a Brummie, and Val who was from Birkenhead, the other side of the Mersey from me, and we clung to each other, northerners in a sea of posh southerners. Val had a boyfriend, Matt, also from Birkenhead, who was in the year above us, and he had a friend called Neil who would eventually become my first husband.
Our class only consisted of twelve people, which was a good number because it was enough to have an audience for any performance you gave, without being too big that you felt you were in danger of being lost in the group. One day we were talking to the new principal. He was really inspirational and when he spoke, we all listened. He asked, ‘Can anyone who’s working class put their hands up?’
The three of us sheepishly put up our hands, thinking that maybe this was it, we’d been found out finally and be out on the street with our bags following swiftly behind. Ralph Jago pointed to myself, Val and Mike.
‘These are the ones to watch, because they are the next generation of young actors with angry, working-class voices.’
It was the time of John Osborne and Harold Pinter, and kitchen-sink dramas like A Taste of Honey. Coronation Street was already on and suddenly this part of society, my part of society, was being seen and heard in the theatre and on-screen. We were all thrilled with this recognition, and from then on we were all as northern as the Mersey tunnel, laying on our accents thick and thoroughly enjoying the thought of being at the centre of this new wave of modern theatre.
At the end of first year we were all assessed in order to be allowed through on to the second and final year. I wasn’t presumptive enough to think that I would breeze through, but I didn’t expect Ralph Jago’s criticism. He said that he thought he might have to let me go. As far as he could see I was just ‘a personality’.
Looking me straight in the eye, he said, ‘You can leave here and be a poor man’s Pat Phoenix. You’ll work, don’t get me wrong, but I think you could be a good actress if you worked hard.’
I could feel my face burning with embarrassment. I stuttered something about really wanting to carry on. And it was true. It was all I ever wanted to do.
He allowed me through on to the second year, but I felt that I had to really come back and show him that I deserved my place at Webber Douglas.
That summer I went to work as a ward orderly in a psychiatric unit, or lunatic asylum, as they were still called in those days. I was staying in Lincoln where I had gone for the summer with Neil, who by then was my boyfriend. It was an unusual choice of job but as always I was just trying to make ends meet and any job was better than none. And at the back of my mind I knew that whatever the job was like it wouldn’t be dull and it would be grist to the acting mill.
I was charged with varied tasks. I would make up beds, clean, empty bedpans and look after the patients and talk to them. I found it quite upsetting taking these seemingly eloquent people to have their ECT – electroconvulsive therapy to give it its more accurate, brutal name – only for them to return shaken and subdued. There was one lady who was convinced that she was the housekeeper. She dominated the ward and even had keys to the cupboards that she kept hidden under her apron. The staff had learned to let her get on with her ‘job’ and she seemed happy with life and her lot. There were also three ladies who were in their seventies but had the mental age of toddlers and I loved spending time with them. They viewed the world with such childlike wonder. We would pack them off to ‘nursery’ every day and they would all hold hands and walk together. They would then amuse themselves with books and toys. When I think about how frightened my own mother could be in her final years, when she was having one of her delusional episodes, it is nice to look back and think how happy these ladies were. They may have been institutionalised but they were happy and content in their own little worlds. Most of the women in there had had nervous breakdowns of some sort but a few had been there for many years, put into a psychiatric ward simply for having a child out of wedlock. It is so shocking that this sort of thing went on.
I was very interested in everything happening on the ward but soon found myself getting a little too embroiled in the lives of some of the patients. I felt sorry for them – they were locked away, tormented by their own minds – the least I could do was hear what they had to say. I became close to one woman. She helped me change the beds and we would chat. She asked me if I would teach her the twist, which I duly did. A few days later something triggered an episode of psychosis in her and she began screaming and grabbed one of the staff, threatening them. The next time I saw her she was heavily sedated and the whole incident really upset me.
The matron called me to her office and gave me a dressing down for getting too close to the patients. ‘It’s a fine line working somewhere like this, Sue, don’t step over it.’
She advised that I take a step back and do the job without taking it home with me. She was right, of course, she had been there too many years not to know how orderlies should or shouldn’t conduct themselves.
By an extraordinary coincidence, once back at drama school after the summer break the new play that we were to perform was announced. It was Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, or to give it its full, not very succinct title: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. It is a play within a play and I was cast as Charlotte Corday, a woman institutionalised for suffering from narcolepsy. It was the perfect role for me to show that I could embody a part – I’d just had a full summer of research to draw from.
The role of Charlotte Corday wasn’t one I would have been naturally drawn to in my first year as she was very well spoken. It seemed to me that there was always someone else in my year better suited to speaking with received pronunciation, or as we said in those days standard English. But this was what Ralph Jago had meant when he said that I might just become a character actress. I was avoiding taking on the challenge of speaking with a voice that wasn’
t my own, or inhabiting a character that wasn’t close to my own personality, because I was afraid that I might not get it right.
In performing this role I proved to myself that I could rise to the challenge. It was important to keep my own accent and use it when the role deemed it necessary but it was also good to lose myself in this role that was so far removed from myself. We performed the play and it went down very well. I was pleased with my performance and I felt that I had finally got what it meant to be an actress.
I went to Ralph Jago’s office the following day filled with trepidation, sure that he would see some cracks in my accent and performance, but he told me that he had been thrilled by it. I was so relieved; I left the room on a high, convinced that I’d finally arrived. I’d like to say that from then on he thought I was the best thing since sliced bread but the very next play we did he shouted at me again for ‘just acting’, bringing me back down to earth with a bang, and making me realise that I had to tackle every role with the same enthusiasm and understanding of the character as I had with the role of Charlotte.
Ralph Jago was one of the great teachers in my life and there are still things now that he said to me about performing that I try to adhere to whenever I take on a new role.
I thoroughly loved my two years at drama school. To have that opportunity to immerse myself in something I was so interested in was a real privilege. We were taught to sing – as much as anyone could teach me to sing! – to dance and even to fence. It was a real joy to spend all of this time learning the different components of a profession I so desperately wanted to join.