Page 16 - My Story

It was some time in May 1946 that a tall girl approached me at school with the unlikely name of
Yardenna Lipshitz and invited me to her June birthday party. I don’t remember too much of the party –
I’m sure Mrs. Lipshitz (Ella) put on a lovely tea with dainty sandwiches, sprinkled with mustard and cress,
and cakes and Mr. Lipshitz (Chaim) played the piano and encouraged each of us to sing solo. Denna
announced that I had just been accepted into the junior choir, so I had to sing and chose (why?) “Hearts
of Oak”.

Hearts of oak are our ships
Jolly tars are our men
We always are ready.
Steady, boys steady.
We’ll fight, and we’ll conquer again and again.

A good piece of Victorian patriotism if ever there was one!

Denna and I were best friends and inseparable from this day forward. We sat next to each other,
we talked endlessly, in class and outside. School was midway between our two homes and sometimes I
would walk with her to her home, a nice three-bedroom semi in Upper Clapton with a real back garden
full of flowers and sometimes she would come to mine but in any case, when we weren’t together, we
would phone each other the moment we got home and talk and talk. We both liked the same subjects,
the same teachers. We liked English and French – she was better than me at French and got some kind
of scholarship to spend a summer with a French family; we did not like Maths although I could cope - she
was a disaster. I could always see the logic of arithmetic, geometry made some sense, but algebra was
never going to be of any use. History could be interesting, but Geography was very boring – why did I
need to know about the Great Lakes or the wheat fields of Kansas? I wasn’t going there! I liked gym,
Denna didn’t and doesn’t exercise to this day, and I played netball for the house, but never for the school!
Art was fun, but I was never good, and we also took domestic science which included, as well as sewing
those awful green knickers (Denna never finished hers and her mother eventually turned them into an
apron!), some pretty bad cooking. One day we had to make the faculty dinner as they were staying for
some late activity. We were asked to make a large, nutritious salad, which we did. It was put onto a
platter and Denna and I topped it off with some nice grated yellow soap.

I don’t remember at what age we became stage struck and started going to theatres. In those
days you could go to a theatre at around 10am and pay sixpence to put down a stool which would reserve
your seat that same evening in the topmost gallery – the gods. You would go back that evening, fairly
early, occupy your stool – it didn’t work if you had more than a five-inch spread of bottom, which few did
in those days – and then pay two shillings for your seat in the gods. Denna and I did this nearly every
Saturday from about the age of fourteen and saw some wonderful theatre. After the show we would rush
round to the stage door to wait for autographs and we got some pretty good ones – Laurence Olivier,
Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike, Lewis Casson, Celia Johnson who played a brilliant
Saint Joan at the Old Vic, before the Old Vic got back into its own theater. What did I do with those
autographs? They’d be worth something now. One night I had the excitement of recognizing an actor
who had been stationed with my father in Gibraltar – Terence Soall. I introduced myself as Alec Whine’s
daughter. Oh yes, old Alec, how is he? Was his comment but I thought that was pretty exciting coming
from a real actor.

And then there was the music hall and we were living very close to the Hackney Empire. Music
Hall was a tradition in England probably from the mid nineteenth century until it died in the 1950s,
something like yesterday’s variety shows. We had standup comics and silly songs such as:

He used to call me his little Mary Ann
I used to think that he was my young man
Till mother caught his eye and they got married on the sly
And now I have to call him, “Father!”

And
I live in Trafalgar Square with four lions to guard me
Fountains and statues all over the place
And the metropol staring me right in the face.

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