Page 22 - My Story

audition before me and left as I was called in. I did my piece – I think it was from, “I Remember Mama”,
John van Druten’s play and then the people auditioning me asked whether I had heard from the Old Vic.
I said, “No” and they said, “Well, we have, and they are going to accept you and we are prepared to give
you a grant!”

I sailed out of that building and ran to the bus stop. Harold Pinter was still there, and I shouted
my news. He gave me a hug and said, “Well, when we get there, I am going to take care of you” and that
was the last I ever saw of him because he was not accepted! I know this proves something but what –
that you cannot judge future success of either a fifteen or an eighteen-year-old?

So, I did not work very hard at my shorthand or my typing and certainly not at book-keeping or
whatever else the Commercial Sixth had to offer. Poor Mrs. Dove – she was a colourless little lady and
really ineffective.

During this last year at school our history teacher, Miss Franklin, announced she was getting
married. We girls were astounded. First, she was ancient, at least forty-five and second, she was really
ugly, poor woman. She had buck teeth, wispy light brown hair, glasses like coke bottles and a low-slung
bosom but here she was, about to marry a sea captain! She invited a small group of us to her home in
Hampstead to see her trousseau. She was also the Florence house mistress and had always favoured me,
so Jackie and I were invited. Her trousseau was lovely – I remember frothy, lacy undergarments and
nightwear but of course, we girls were stifling our giggles. Girls are very cruel. Miss Franklin had also
written some novels which she had had privately published and she made us a gift of those – there are
three or four of them amongst my many books. Not very good, as I recall but I cannot now bring myself
to throw them out. I hope Miss Franklin and her sea captain had many happy years together.

So, in the autumn of 1950 I became a first-year student at the Old Vic School. The school was in
Thurlow Park Road, West Dulwich and occupied the building of what had been a girls’ boarding school. It
was quite a long journey from Hackney and meant getting two different buses, with the attendant waits
but there was no question of my getting a room nearer. On the first day we met all the faculty and got
our timetables. We were going to have voice lessons and a lot of gym so that we learned to move, make-
up – in those days the stage lighting was stronger, and men and women wore heavy grease paint, sold
mainly by Leichner. The base was always Leichner number 5. The girls were given long skirts to wear so
that we would learn to walk in a more controlled and elegant way. I was amazed at the nationalities and
ages of the students – I was the youngest at sixteen, but many people had already been through university
or had been working. We had a girl there who was a ballerina with Ballet Rambert who, because she was
not tiny (not that big, either) always got the character parts and thought she would try acting. There were
a couple of children of well-known actors and people from the United States, Canada, New Zealand,
Australia – I don’t recall any whose mother tongue was not English, other than a young man from Quebec
but we all had to get rid of whatever accents we had and learn to speak what was then considered a
neutral English and known as BBC English.

My two girlfriends already spoke unaccented English. They were Avril Elgar and Sue Armstrong.
Avril, small, thin and fair and given to depression and Sue of robust figure and robust personality whose
father was Australian and had been a naval commander in the war. He was now some kind of diplomat
and lived with his elegant wife, who, I believe was from Jersey in the Channel Islands (anyway, that’s
where their cigarettes still came from) in a Georgian house in Belgravia. Avril had a thing going with Eric
Thomson, originator of “The Magic Roundabout”, a popular children’s’ show of the sixties and father of
Emma but later switched to his friend, James Maxwell, an American, whom she later married.

Sue had already been through the stage management and production school and now decided
she wanted to know more about acting. She and I used to save our money for trips to Stratford upon
Avon. We would spend the money on tickets and hitch-hike up there, unknown to our parents, and stay
at the Stratford youth hostel. I loved those times – probably five or six during our two years at the Vic –
and saw some great theatre.

In November 1950 the Old Vic opened its doors again. It had been bombed in the early years of
the war and now it was all mended and renovated and the students were asked to volunteer and clean it

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