Page 23 - My Story

up and ready it for a grand reopening. We set to, willingly, in a really filthy theatre but by the time we’d
finished it was gleaming. I remember setting banks of red plush seats in place and feeling really proud
that I’d had my hands on something tangible.

You’d think we would have been rewarded for our labour but, no. We spent the night before the
opening sleeping on the street outside the theatre so that we would be there to purchase our stools for
the gallery for opening night.

And what a night that was. Anyone who was anyone in theatre was there. Dame Edith Evans gave
the opening prologue, a poem by Christopher Hassall which started –

London be glad! Your Shakespeare’s home again
After his sojourn in St. Martin’s Lane

Cover of re-opening of Old Vic

The play was Twelfth Night with Peggy Ashcroft – and yet, I seem to remember John Gielgud speaking
the prologue from Romeo and Juliet

Two houses, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona, where we set our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Whence civil blood makes civil hands unclean

Maybe that was a special showcase for him – or maybe I’m confusing it with some other occasion.

Life went on at the Vic. We were encouraged to experience LIFE. Do things you wouldn’t normally
do, urged the teachers. Go and see dog racing (known as “going to the dogs” in the vernacular) – too
much for my parents, but a group went. Go Old Tyme Dancing – I was permitted, wearing my mother’s
cut down green moiré dress.

At the end of each school year we did a sort of show case. The first year I did a wild Song of
Deborah from the Old Testament, Judges, weaving around in a primitive dance while I proclaimed –

Hear oh ye kings, rejoice oh ye princes

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