by Noel Coward
If one hits the other either in anger or fun, he must allow the other to hit back. Any other offence must be paid for.
We must stick up for each other against anyone or anything, and stand by each other in all danger.
We must tell each other all secrets concerned with ourselves, other confidences may be held sacred even from one another.
We must not talk RELIGION unless it is inevitable.
When writing to mutual friends we must tell each other, we must also tell each other what we have said in the letter.
We must swear by “HONOUR AS A PAL” and hold it THE most sacred of bonds in the world.
We must tell each other what we think about the other's appearance or behaviour.
We must go straight to one another in case of mischief being made and believe NOTHING unless it comes from the other's own lips.
NO ONE, not even our Parents, may keep us from one another.
If any other rules are formed or thought of, they must be added (with the consent of both) at the end of this document.
NO OTHER PERSON may be admitted into our PALSHIP or SECRETS.
SIGNATURE OF BOTH
“Rules of Palship” between Noël and Esme Wynne.
In 1932, when Noël was first contemplating his autobiography, Esme wrote, “I found our rules of palship in an old desk the other day. Would you like a copy? It's terribly funny and shows what complete children we were in some ways, even at fifteen. I'm afraid, however, the ‘religion’ clause has been violated. So, where do we stand legally?”
•
ESME ASPIRED to be a writer and turned out vast quantities of romantic verse (“alive with elves, mermaids, leafy glades and Pan—a good deal of Pan”). Not to be outdone by a mere girl, Noël found that his competitive spirit urged him to do the same. Frequently they would collaborate, although his efforts tended to turn to the humorous. Both became decidedly prolific. Pen skated across paper, fingers across the keys of the typewriter donated by Uncle Walter Bulteel, and neither stopped writing for the rest of their lives.
In a 1958 letter to a friend, Esme felt she could pin down the precise moment when Noël's ambition to be a writer was fixed:
It was during the Rainbow at the Savoy (where we first met). Charles Hawtrey got me as “leading lady” to write a three-act fairy play [The Prince's Brick’] for production at a special matinee [February 2, 1912].
It got a great deal of extra publicity because the censor banned it, on account of its length, so at Hawtrey's invitation, the audience had to go out of the theatre and return to witness a “dress rehearsal” of it! All this excitement and publicity, so dear, even then, to the heart of the youthful Noël determined him to write himself, and he suggested that we collaborate, as we did in excruciatingly bad sketches, stories and songs during the next few years.
1912. In Noël's frequent letters to his young actress friend Esme Wynne (“Stoj” to his “Poj”), the juvenile wit was not confined to the words.
When they were parted by circumstance—such as when Esme went off to a Belgian convent school—Noël would write her whimsical letters. In the early summer of 1914 (in a letter of which the first page is missing) he writes:
Who is this Miriam of whom you speak? Give her my love and tell her that I hope she'll do some good with it because I can't. Ah! Me I am wandering again. At the beginning of August I am going to Lee [-on-Solent] avec my parents and they are going to stay about six weeks, and I don't know what I am going to do without my Stodge because there won't be any room at Lee when we are all down there.
Can't we arrange so that we can be together lots? Please go on with all your wicked ways at the Convent and get expelled and come home! DO!!!!! I am longing for you. I've got to sing at three concerts and “At Homes” (mixed) this month….
(Now his rendition of what happens at the “Agonising Theatre” when he does so. Outside a long line of matchstick people queue to get in. Inside onstage, Noël is singing, “My heart still clings to you.” Below, the same people pour out of the emergency exit “After the 1st line.”)
I am going away on the 1st July avec Philip. It will be ripping will not it?
(Another drawing captioned “I Dream of You By Night and Day.” A Noël with outstretched elongated arms lies in bed and cries, “Help! Mother.” Another figure [Esme?] sits on top of a London omnibus carrying advertising slogans for “Pears Soap” and “Wait and See Liver Pills.” Just to make sure there is no mistake, the figure also bears the caption “This is a Buss.”)
Isn't Motor Cycling Glorious I did it a lot on my cousin's cycle down in Cornwall it certainly beats Motoring for thrills.
(Drawing of a boy and girl on a motorcycle. Her hat has been blown off.)
Goodbye now darling old Stodgekins from your ever loving Pal to all Eternity.
Podge N.B. You got some Romantic in your last letter.
•
NINETEEN FIFTEEN.…and war is suddenly no longer a vaguely romantic adventure. Every family is losing a father, a brother, a husband. Philip Streatfeild, who, like so many others, enlisted so bravely in November 1914, is invalided out in the spring and dies on June 3 of tuberculosis of the lung, the same condition Noël had suffered from a year before. In Present Indicative, Noël would write: “Philip died…without ever realizing to the full the kindness he had done me.”
At Christmas Noël was reengaged for the annual production of Rainbow, playing the part of The Slacker, half man, half dragon, and all ham— at least the way Noël played him. Again in the cast was Esme, and as soon as the run finished, they were engaged to tour in Charley's Aunt. Noël was to play the title part, Charles Wyckham, and Esme was Amy Spettigue, the ward.
1916. Charley's Aunt was the homesick young Noël's first extended tour—and it showed him more of his native land than he reasonably wanted to see.
The tour crisscrossed the country, which, in those days, boasted a theater of sorts—and sometimes more than one—in anything that even called itself a town: Hastings, Nottingham, Chester, Blackpool, Rugby, Birmingham, Manchester, Hanley, Torquay, Bristol, Wolverhampton. Sometimes the venues were geographically adjacent; more often the company went wherever a one-week slot was open, regardless of the travel involved. It was a world of boarding houses that would take “theatricals”—some of them a home-away-from-home, others rather more questionable—of packing up the show after the Saturday evening performance, and of waiting around in draughty railway stations early every Sunday morning for a train that would arrive late and take forever to get where it was going.
It was a way of life that taught an actor his or her trade—and made them determined to get out of the provinces and into the West End as soon as possible. If they ever returned, it would be to “ride in triumph through Persepolis” (or at least Hull). In later years Noël would recall “those wonderful touring days” in song:
Touring days, touring days,
What ages it seems to be
Since the landlady at Norwich
Served a mouse up in the porridge
And a beetle in the morning tea.
Every week, wherever they were playing, Noël would write home to Violet. A collage of extracts from those letters gives some idea of what his life then was like.
To begin with, Noël was not particularly happy to be cast as Charley, a character he felt was there only for the others to score off. He felt that the part of Jack Chesney offered more opportunity, and he was delighted to be able to stand in as Jack at Nottingham.
I was a great success … I looked so funny, like a fair edition of Vesta Tilley [the famous male impersonator in the music halls of the period]. I forgot most of his lines and had to gag a lot. I played it again on Monday and my love scene with Kitty was the funniest thing you ever knew. I said—“ My hopes will be nil and my fears tremendous,” instead of the other way around and, of course, Kitty collapsed like a pricked balloon. I am playing Charley again now but I quite enjoyed playing Jack for a change.
T
here were frequent bouts of homesickness, which Esme shared, and one suspects that each indulged the other. Birmingham again:
Bless your dear heart, how homesick I am sometimes. Esme and I both wept on the stage in unison the other day.
Hanley:
My own old mother, how I am longing and longing for you. So is Esme for her Mummy. We have both been crying hard for the last hour. Never again do I go on tour. This feeling of being so far away is too dreadful for words, but I must try not to be melancholy and cheer up but, all the same, Hanley is the most horribly depressing place I have ever been to….
Not surprisingly, some of their colleagues were less than sympathetic to the two tear-stained young thespians:
Ela [Norah Howard] got in an awful rage with us yesterday for crying and was very rude indeed, since then she has sulked and not spoken a word! She is very nice in some ways but Stodge and I can never stand anyone who sulks, so next week Esme is having a bedroom and sitting room in one and I am having a room out and we are having all our meals together. I think it will be nicer, anyway it's no business of Ela's if we like to cry for our mothers and I'm sure it did us good.
Being on the road so long, of course, created certain domestic problems:
Are there two vests of mine at home? It seems to me that I have been wearing the two I have on now since the tour started. I think they are getting somewhat congealed!!! Please send me the other two.
Whenever they came to a new location and had any free time, Noël and Esme would explore the neighborhood.
When the New Forest was nearby (Esme recalled) “we went into the forest and heard the stillness of it all and rubbed our faces in the cool moss and I picked ferns and red and green ivy and baby leaves. The smell was earthy and good.” While in Torquay they found a suitably quiet beach where they “sat on a rock and let the water run over us, then we raced about the rocks and danced on the cliffs in the nude—it was so lovely and our figures looked so pretty against the green and blue.”
Not that every outing was so idyllic. At Peterborough:
Yesterday I went for a country walk with Stoj…and after we had walked across a rather boggy meadow I discovered I had lost one of my goloshes! I hunted for it but it was no good, so in a fit of Pique (good word that!) I threw my other one up in a tree and it stuck! So I threw Sidney (the stick) up to knock Gerald (the golosh!) down and HE stuck. I tried for three quarters of an hour to get him down but he was firmly wedged, so now I am stickless!
And at Hastings:
Stodge and Ayshie have been very bad with sunburn … I haven't been particularly sore but I am nearly black and peeling gracefully at all extremities. Such fun!
We had an air raid [zeppelin] the other night a few miles away, also a thunderstorm. Such excitement!
Ayshie tobogganed down a rather steep cliff on her bummy yesterday and bruised same! Little Rogue!
Torquay:
We have all been having great fun taking silly photos with Kitty's camera. [Kitty Verdun was the name of the character played by Enid Groom]. Kindly imagine me your pretty little son lying at full length on the Promenade with Ela sitting on my stomach and with an upraised penknife in her hand and Kathy Barber in the background with her hair over her face crying—“ Stop—in Heaven's name—Stop!!!” We took lots more of the same style!
Tomorrow we are going out with a cigar box on a tripod and pretend to take cinema pictures. We have already shocked half of Torquay. We shall finish it off tomorrow.
Hastings:
On Sunday Ayshie and I went on the pier to listen to the band and like fools, we took the dog with us. He barked without ceasing all through Pagliacci and we had heated altercations with practically the entire population of Hastings. As we rose with great dignity to go, some feeble-minded rogue at the back started clapping and everyone took it up! So without any fuss and to their extreme consternation we sat down again! Stalky then resumed his barking and kept it up all afternoon.
Wolverhampton and the tour are almost over but not before they sncounter another problem:
My dear, I get so fed up with relations…On Friday morning we were all in our sitting room, Kitty with her hair down, having just washed it, Esme putting lace on a pair of knickers and myself painfully working through a new song at the piano, when in walked dear Dolly. She asked us all to tea that afternoon. She said it was a two penny bus fare. We all at once went into peals of hysterical laughter because, being Friday, we had exactly I'Ad. between us…Well, Dolly thought we were laughing at her and looked rather offended, so we had to explain.
She was very scandalized at us not having any money and said how pathetic it was. We said we thought it peculiarly amusing. Anyhow, she lent us 2/6d. In the afternoon we all trooped up there. She has a lovely house and we entertained her very nicely, all singing and dancing our very Bests. Esme and I sang “We've been married just one year,” and she was most shocked. I've never met anyone so painfully provincial in all my life.
Well, on Saturday I was asked to lunch alone. I had to go to give her the 2/6d. back, and all through lunch she and her stout and corseted sister enlarged upon the dreadful Pitfalls and Perils that await a young girl on the Stage. She said if she had any children, she'd never let them go on the Stage! And how she pitied poor Esme and Enid being on the Stage! And anyone more revolting than her husband I've never seen. He drank ale and made a noise like water running out of the bath and crammed his fork with food and shoved it into his great gullet. Altogether he made me quite sick. All through lunch he read me extracts from Lloyd George's speeches and long letters that he (Mr. Robertson) had written to the Daily Mail… I did try to drown the noise he was making with his mouth by bubbling into my lemonade, but I failed miserably.
Dear, dear, etc. It was the limit. She said she didn't want to come to Charley's Aunt, as she'd heard…that I had got such a rotten part! I said she had better not go, then and at once began to point out and paint in lurid colours the awful Trials and Temptations that await the common or garden (generally the former) typist and that having a typewriter myself, I could well believe it. I said that the Stage was the one moral and proper place nowadays and that thousands of respectable and be-principled Clergyman's Sons and Daughters had left comfortable and upholstered in red plush Vicarages for the staid lives of Actors and Actresses. This seemed to impress them and I left the house inwardly fuming but outwardly smiling and with a Play Pictorial I have been wanting for years under my coat.
Luckily, there was light at the end of the railway tunnel:
On Sunday my train arrives at Euston at 1:45 and leaves here at 11:00. We shall have to take a taxi as I shall have Bertha the Basket as well as my two bags, Hilda and Eileen, to say nothing of Joyce the Typewriter and Maurice and Oswald, the Mackintosh and Overcoat respectively but I think I shall be able to pack them as they are only boys!
SOMEHOW OR OTHER Noël and Esme found the time to write together, and in 1917 two short plays by Esnomel (their clumsy joint sobriquet) were put on as curtain raisers in professional theaters: Ida Collaborates (The hast Chapter), played at the Theatre Royal, Aldershot, in August, and Woman and Whisky, in November at Wimbledon. After which their lives sharply diverged and put an end to their working together.
The old intimacy was over, though the friendship continued after Esme's marriage, which broke up in 1929.
In later years, when Noël was making his name, Esme would send him her work for his professional critique. His notes to her offer some interesting sidelights on his own emerging theories of drama. In many ways they comprised a first draft for the book on the theater he intended to write one day and never did.
You're at your old game—youpoint things too much. (Let the fact of there being a scarcity of men be apparent in their attitude, but don't mention it, because it's blatant!)
Your dinner scene is ridiculously short. You must give at least two pages to every course, if not more.
You must not abbreviate words and use suburban slang such as “va
mping,” “coddling,” etc., unless it's essential psychologically. (It's quite appalling and the obvious result of the people you're mixing with—you never used to do it.)
You have a serene and maddening disregard for superficial details which destroys atmosphere in exactly the places where you wish to use them to create it. (One bright moment that shattered my sensibilities is the thought that Peter's room in 1915—16 being filled with lusty photographs of Marie Tempest—then about 59—and Mrs. Patrick Campbell—then about 48).
You've devoted your entire energy to the writing and haven't given a thought to construction or sense of the Theatre or Drama or climax— all of which are necessary in a good play.
You have a Prose mind not a dialogue mind. Novelists can't write plays and playwrights can't write novels—at least very seldom— Clemence Dane and Galsworthy.
NINETEEN THIRTY-SIX NOW, and Noël is touring with Tonight at 8:30, but even so, he's not too busy to spare time to write to Esme about her latest offering:
Kings Theatre, Edinburgh Darling Stoj
As I have been living in the country in almost complete seclusion since June working on three plays and have only spent nine nights in the gay metrollops in four months, I am actually more busy socially now than I was then, but even so I have found, nay made opportunity during these hectic crowded hours to read Prelude to Peace from what is known as cover to cover. I did not find the actual reading dull, owing to a strange new simplicity of style that you have evolved. I think the bulk of it is extraordinarily well done and, apart from just a few sentimental digressions, rigidly to the point. No intelligent reader could fail to appreciate your utter sincerity and the sound sense of your educational theories but unfortunately, as you are an idealist, soi disant, and I am a realist, ever so soi disant, I fear we shall never see human life eye to eye and tooth to tooth and cheek to cheek and bottom to bottom. At the risk of bitter postal accusations of reactionalism, I will boldly announce that it is my considered opinion that the human race {soi disant) is cruel, idiotic, sentimental, predatory, ungrateful, ugly, conceited and egocentric to the last ditch and that the occasional discovery of an isolated exception is as deliriously surprising as finding a sudden brazil nut in what you know to be five pounds of vanilla creams. These glorious moments, although not making life actually worth living, perhaps, at least make it pleasanter.