Untold Stories

  ‘We’ll find you somewhere else. I’ve heard very good reports of a place over at Cawood.’

  I said, ‘Cawood? There’s nothing at Cawood. I get few enough visitors as it is. Nobody’s going to pole over to Cawood.’

  She said, ‘We would, mother, and that’s all you want.’

  I said, ‘You mean it’s handy for the boat?’

  She said, ‘Well, we can’t let you stay here. And once we’ve put in the claim for compensation, they won’t let you.’

  I said, ‘How do you mean, compensation?’

  She said, ‘Mother, the home has a duty of care. He was interfering with people. Fortunately, not you; you’re too old. But your friend, Blanche, and the other two… I saw him.’

  I said, ‘So what’s going to happen to Mr Pilling?’

  She said, ‘Well, for obvious reasons the home isn’t anxious to prosecute, but he’ll never show his face again here, I can tell you.’

  She said, ‘Shall you want counselling?’

  I said, ‘Yes, I bloody well do want counselling. If he stops.’

  She said, ‘What?’

  I said, ‘I used to look forward to his visits. I lived for Tuesdays. We all did.’

  She said, ‘Mother, you disgust me.’

  I said, ‘Not as much as you disgust me. And always have, you po-faced article. Not to put too fine a point on it, I like having the tops of my legs stroked, even at my age, and so does Blanche and if there’s a gentleman like Mr Pilling willing to undertake the task and derive pleasure from it then I prefer to think of that not as something disgusting but as God moving in his mysterious way.

  ‘That or else he deserves the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.’

  And I said, ‘I’m not moving from this home. It’s not ideal but it’s better than the last dump you put me in.

  ‘I shall tell them it was all done of my own free will. We were consenting adults.

  ‘So you can kiss goodbye to your flaming compensation.’

  Bindra comes in with the air freshener.

  I said ‘Bindra. I think Mrs Turnbull wants a tissue.’

  End of section.

  It’s lovely Blanche and me having our own room.

  We’ve got a TV that we can switch off and we don’t have Radio 1 blaring out all the time, or Lois banging her tray. We’ve each got one of these cassette things and we can have the window open if we want.

  The home were so grateful I didn’t want any compensation, they put us in here at a discount. Vera still wanted to shift me somewhere else but the rate was so reasonable Neville wouldn’t hear of it. So boat or no boat, he turns out to have more sense than she does.

  Mr Pilling still comes over on Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays as well, or Arthur as we now call him. We can’t wean him off the religion but as I said to Blanche, without the Bible in one hand he doesn’t seem to be able to function with the other.

  We’re on the Epistle of Timothy at the moment.

  It’s all very … ‘civilised’ would I think be the word. And we’ve got a nice outlook. You can see the planes coming in to Leeds and Bradford airport and there’s a view of the reservoir and sometimes I kid myself it’s the sea.

  I look out of the window on an evening, watching the last of the sun and I know it’s daft, but sometimes I’ll wave at it. (She waves.) Bye-bye, sun. See you tomorrow.

  End.

  Thora Hird

  1911–2003

  One of Thora’s many merits as an actress – and I shall call her that rather than the currently more correct actor because Thora would have called herself an actress and not thought it demeaning to do so – one of Thora’s many merits as an actress was that she was scrupulous about the text. Always word perfect, she knew if she’d said an ‘and’ when you’d written a ‘but’ and almost shamed you by the respect she accorded to the words you had written and her anxiety to reproduce them perfectly.

  It’s ironic, then, that her first memorable performance for me should have been to some extent improvised. This was in John Schlesinger’s 1962 film of Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving, in which she played the sour-faced Mrs Rothwell, straitlaced, house-proud and watchful mother of the beautiful Ingrid. Woken late one night, she comes downstairs to find Alan Bates’s Vic drunk and snogging the matchless Ingrid in the parlour. Bates is about to apologise when he is abruptly and copiously sick behind the sofa.

  Thora’s reaction to this, as written, was ‘You filthy, disgusting pig’, a line tailor-made to her talents. However, it had to cover a good deal of action, Bates, for instance, throwing up at least twice, and so Schlesinger told her to improvise … not a technique Thora had ever had any occasion to acquire; her job was to say the words not make them up. Still she did her best and having a basic text, ‘You filthy disgusting pig’, she proceeded to play variations on it.

  ‘You pig,’ glaring at the cowering Bates.

  ‘You’re filthy, you. Disgusting.’

  Then, forcing herself to look at the sick behind the sofa:

  ‘You … you’re a pig.’

  Schlesinger, with what in every sense was gay abandon, kept the camera rolling until Thora had given every possible variation of the four words the script had allowed her, her frustration both at her own lack of invention and the sadism of the director transmuted into a memorable performance on the screen.

  Lear grieving over the corpse of Cordelia was not more grief-stricken than Mrs Rothwell over her polluted parlour.

  Long before this, of course, she had become a favourite on television, in films and in the theatre and all her life she never stopped working. On the Yorkshire novelist Winifred Holtby’s gravestone there is the inscription:

  God give me work

  Till my life shall end

  And life

  Till my work is done.

  Few lives can have seen that prayer so fully answered as Thora’s, who played her first part on the stage of the Royalty Theatre, Morecambe at two months old and who was still working ninety-one years later in Studio 5 at Portland Place a few months before she died.

  Until she was quite late on in life the parts she played were generally comic and so were underrated and it was only in late middle age when she began to play the occasional serious role that her talent was properly acknowledged. There are not many artists who reach a peak in their seventies and eighties but Thora did. She lived long enough to be taken seriously.

  She never took herself seriously, though no one was more dedicated to the job in hand, coached in her words by Scotty, her devoted husband, and after he died by Jan, their daughter, her family’s devotion not the least element in Thora’s success.

  And she knew she was loved and it delighted her, people calling out to her in the street knowing they’d always get a smile or a wave. It’s a sort of appreciation that can be dangerous to an artist, but loved though she was, whether her fans would approve of her in a part came quite low down on her list.

  Doris, the part she played in A Cream Cracker Under the Settee, is not a particularly nice woman, narrow, censorious, preferring concrete in the garden to grass and disliking trees because they drop leaves everywhere. As in the course of rehearsal the harsh nature of this woman began to come home Thora took me on one side.

  ‘You couldn’t give me a line somewhere, love, that would show that even if I’m not nice now, I may have been once upon a time?’

  I didn’t manage to think of one, partly because I didn’t really want to, and there are many performers in that situation who would, as it were, have tipped the audience the wink off their own bat, softening a line, perhaps, or giving the occasional sad smile. Thora didn’t. If harsh was what you’d written that was the way she’d play it.

  And she won your heart as a writer because, unusually in our profession, she trusted the words more than she did the director.

  She was never difficult with directors but there’d been so many of them that she’d long since ceased to bother to learn their names, referring to them all t
o their faces by the generic name ‘Mr de Grunwald’, presumably after Anatole de Grunwald, with whom she’d worked in her early days in films.

  Her expectations of a director were not high. She was once singing to me the praises of a director with whom she’d worked on television, saying how she’d had this difficult scene to play on location:

  ‘And you could tell he was a good director, love, because he put me against the most beautiful lamppost you’ve ever seen.’

  It’s not a notion of directing that would commend itself to Peter Brook.

  And she got better as she got older and in ways that her father, always her sternest critic, would have approved. She got simpler and, given the chance, relied less on her familiar tricks, letting her own personality show through and steering closer to herself as the best acting demands.

  At the finish she sometimes found it hard to tell the difference, taking the frail and immobilised creatures whom she played both in my plays and in Deric Longden’s Lost for Words as versions of herself; she was acting out her own demise. They were on the last lap and so was she.

  Peter Cook and Dudley Moore used to be able to make the band laugh. Thora could make the cameraman cry and the whole crew sometimes and when she finished the scene in Waiting for the Telegram in which she recalled the departure of her First War sweetheart it was a minute or two in the studio before anybody trusted themselves to speak. Then it was Thora:

  ‘I think I got one of the words wrong. Will you be wanting to go again?’

  Most of the time between takes would be filled with Thora talking about the past, her only rival in relentless reminiscence in my experience being John Gielgud. But whereas the stuff of Gielgud’s recollections was theatre in the West End, Larry and Gertie and Noël, Thora’s memories were of poky gas-lit dressing-rooms in the provinces, playing to a rowdy second house on a Saturday night, the meanness of some of the comedians she’d worked with and the backstage antics of the Crazy Gang and the punishing routine of three performances daily at the height of the Blackpool season.

  For all her success on television and in films, it was this now vanished world that had been her foundation and her home. It was only in the last few months of her life that she ceased to manage on her own and had to be taken into care, at which point she had a choice … between Denville Hall, the home for retired actors, and Brinsley House, the Variety Artists’ Home at Twickenham. That she opted for the latter shows, I think, that for all the awards she had won and the acclaim her acting had been accorded she was still at heart the local lass who could do a turn before the front cloth at the Winter Gardens, Morecambe, or a number like ‘I’m so silly when the moon comes out’ from Our Miss Gibbs, which she did there when she was sixteen and hadn’t forgotten the words when she sang it in a BBC studio only a few months before she died.

  She was blessed at the finish in that her decline was both short and painless, though even in this she could not help but be funny. Still living on her own in her mews flat, she would sometimes become confused and on one occasion telephoned her daughter Jan, complaining bitterly.

  ‘I’m in the studio, love. I’m doing this film with John Wayne only he’s gone out and left me and everybody else has gone out and I’m stuck here on my own.’

  Jan said, ‘Mum, you’re not in the studio, you’re in the flat in the mews.’

  She said, ‘I am not. I’m in the studio with John Wayne and the beggar’s gone out and left me.’

  Jan said, ‘Mum. You’re in the flat. Now look out of the window, is that the mews?’

  Pause.

  ‘Well, it looks like the mews … but they can do wonders with scenery nowadays.’

  Thora only once played in Shakespeare, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. And she could never have thought to play Cleopatra. But Charmian’s lament for the dead Cleopatra is a proper epitaph for this droll-faced northern girl, who in the course of a long and happy life took her place among the best that we have.

  ‘Now boast thee, death. In thy possession lies a lass unparallel’d.’

  Lindsay Anderson

  1923–94

  At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’

  So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing mother to stay in his flat in Swiss Cottage. Before she arrives he cleans up the kitchen and bathroom and is just tackling the fireplace in his mother’s room when the doorbell rings and it’s the studio driver.

  He confides to his diary:

  Thinks: at 48, turning 49, this leading British director on his knees at a dirty grate with a plastic bucket and detergent. Possibly from the outside this looks admirably humble and determinedly individual. To me it feels just a desperate rearguard action. Nobody realises what a mess of loneliness and inadequacy I am inside.

  The last sentence apart, those are my sentiments exactly.

  I worked with Lindsay only once, when he directed my TV play The Old Crowd for LWT in 1978, some account of which I gave (and Lindsay gave too) in the published version of the play. I hadn’t realised why my script should so readily have appealed to him until I read Lambert’s quote from Lindsay’s contribution to Declaration, an anthology of protest pieces by the so-called Angry Young Men.

  Coming back to Britain is, in many respects, like going back to the nursery. The outside world, the dangerous world, is shut away; it sounds muffled. Cretonne curtains are drawn, with a pretty pattern on them of the Queen and her fairytale Prince, riding to Westminster in a golden coach. Nanny lights the fire and sits herself down with a nice cup of tea and yesterday’s Daily Express, but she keeps half an eye on us too, as we bring out our trophies from abroad, the books and pictures we have managed to get past the customs. (Nanny has a pair of scissors handy, to cut out anything it wouldn’t be right for children to see.) The clock ticks on. The servants are all downstairs, watching TV. Mummy and Daddy have gone to the new Noël Coward at the Globe. Sometimes there is a bang from the street outside – backfire, says Nanny. Sometimes there’s a scream from the cellar – Nanny’s lips tighten, but she doesn’t say anything… Is it to be wondered at that, from time to time, a window is found open, and the family is diminished by one? We hear of him later sometimes, living in a penthouse in New York, or a dacha near Moscow.

  This was written in 1958 but when, twenty years later, I worked with Lindsay it was still his view of England, down to the bang in the street outside and the open window, both of which he inserted into the original draft of The Old Crowd.

  As soon as we started working on the script it was plain that Lindsay needed a villain. In feature films and for understandable reasons this role was generally played by the producer or ‘the money’ but there were often lesser villains, too, closer at hand and almost haphazardly decided on: a costume designer, for instance, and more often a woman than a man. Sometimes, unforgivably (though she forgave him), it was his frequent collaborator, the designer Jocelyn Herbert. The nominal producer of The Old Crowd was Stephen Frears, but in real terms it was LWT and its then head of programmes, Michael Grade. Used as I was to the BBC and to my regular producer, Innes Lloyd, I found LWT entirely well-meaning but awkward to work with only because it wasn’t an organisation geared to producing drama. Michael Grade, though, was unwavering in his support and when Lindsay fell behind on the shooting schedule Grade sanctioned extension after extension; when the studio finally broke it was half past three in the morning.

  Inured to the duplicity and stubbornness of the front office, Lindsay, I think, found these accommodations a bit of a disappointment. Cartooned, he would be Old Mother Riley, rolling up her sleeves and with an elaborate display of pugilistics squaring up to
an entirely imaginary opponent.

  In his films, too, Lindsay believed in confrontation, fetching an audience up short, shocking them into recognition. In Is That All There Is?, a TV film that turned out to be virtually an obituary, he intercuts newsreel shots of starving Somalian children with supermarket shelves and shopping carts laden with food. It’s possible Lindsay wanted to chastise his audience, in which case such juxtapositions are permissible if clichéd. But if his intention was to make an audience think or to touch its conscience the technique is just too crude and more likely to elicit groans than guilt.

  Lindsay thought more subtle approaches were timid (and, of course, ‘English’). At the start of my career I might have agreed, but even when I was in Beyond the Fringe (which I’m sure he didn’t much care for) it seemed to me that laughter had to come into the equation. And however manfully Gavin Lambert defends him, it very seldom did: so much of Britannia Hospital, for instance, just isn’t funny.

  One reason Lindsay persistently underestimated the sophistication of his audience was that he didn’t watch much television. He never appreciated the regular diet of not always mild subversion and social criticism that was still the staple of television drama; police brutality or municipal corruption were taken for granted by a TV audience (or were certainly nothing fresh) so they were not easy to shock as Lindsay wanted to shock them. But it wasn’t because they were jaded, just more discriminating than he gave them credit for. He thought he was saying something bold and new in Britannia Hospital but even in 1982 he wasn’t – not in England anyway. One of his Polish friends said: ‘It’s the best Polish film I’ve seen in a long time.’

  Of course his films provoked and when Britannia Hospital was shown at the Cannes Festival during the Falklands War the British delegation staged a walk-out. But quite over what it would be hard to say. There’s a scene in the film where, during a strike of hospital workers, an ambulance is allowed through the picket lines but hospital porters insist on taking their tea break at that point, thus condemning the patient to die in the lobby. ‘Oh, it couldn’t happen,’ one is meant to say (and some critics no doubt did say). But Lindsay could show you chapter and verse in a news item culled by his scriptwriter, David Sherwin.