Page 24 - My Story

I, even I will sing unto the Lord
I will sing praise to the Lord God of Israel

My teachers thought I did a great job – Uncle Nat thought it was weird! We all also performed an
amazing geographical cannon by Ernst Toch, in many parts, which went:

Ratibor! Und die Stadt Honolulu and der See Titicata
Der Popacatepitel liegt nicht in Kanada
Sondern in Mexico, Mexico, Mexico
Kanada, Malaga, Rimini, Brindisi
Kanada, Malaga, Rimini, Brindisi.
Ja, Athen, Athen, Athen
Nagasaki, Yokohama
…….and so on.

I found it on Youtube but in English and I think we did a better job! Jani Strasser was our voice coach and
he got amazing results. We all came out of that school with natural, relaxed voices – none of the loud
strangled sounds to which we, in the United States, are frequently subjected.

I thought I would be spending the long summer vacation of 1951 helping out at my parents’ shop
but Denna’s parents were running a summer camp in Norfolk and, as Denna was going to be in France or
at some other camp, they offered me a job as counsellor. We were at a stately home called Beauchamp
Place and I remember having a good time with a couple of the male counsellors but not too much of what
we did with the kids!

During another vacation I was a “Universal Aunt” – sent out to help the family of an Egyptian
doctor in Harley Street. His family consisted of a wife and two-year-old child. The work was not too
arduous – I can actually only remember having to bake a small potato for the child’s lunch – and there
was also time for the wife to demonstrate on me how they waxed legs in Egypt with a sort of caramel
mixture of melted sugar and water, ouch!

Around this time Jackie and I always seemed to be called on to be bridesmaids. We were
bridesmaids to Irene when she married Uncle Albert, my mother’s younger brother. We wore dresses of
blue lace. When we were called upon to be bridesmaids to cousin Jean when she married Sonny Berman
the blue lace was covered in a kind of white organza coat with puffy sleeves, making us look like
shepherdesses. There was some other transformation when we became bridesmaids to my father’s
cousin’s daughter, Simmie who married Frank Isaacs and there was another occasion too, now lost to
memory.

Back at The Old Vic School the plays we studied were classical, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlow,
restoration comedy, and so on. The students the year before us had performed a restoration comedy at
their end of year show case and Joan Plowright was very funny and quite brilliant in it. Another person
who became well known from that year was Prunella Scales, most well known for her part in Fawlty
Towers. I met her in the dressing room of Avril Elgar at a theatre in Manchester many years later and,
after greeting me she said, “You probably don’t remember me. I was in year 4 at the Vic”!

My parents and sister supported the shows we put on and I remember emerging from one into
thick, black fog. My father was driving an old black van in those days and we all got in to drive the ten
miles or so home – my parents, Jackie and Peter and me. After about two minutes we realised that my
father could not see anything – none of us could. Peter and I got out of the van and did what we had seen
bus conductors do for bus drivers in the fog, we held newspapers in the headlights of the car as we walked
ahead so that way the driver could make walking pace progress. It was a long walk although Peter and I
gave each other breaks - you did not need two guides, curbside was enough.

At our end of course show case I played in a Pirandello comedy, The Great Lord Quex and it was
also then that it was announced that the school would be no more. Year five was the last class of The Old
Vic Theatre School.

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