the labs. Rather than give me a stern rebuke for wrecking things, those present, including Charlie Frend and Les Norman, the producer, simply accepted the situation and went home. I, however, felt terrible about it and never again was stupid enough to overburden myself with too heavy a load.
I had become friendly with another editor, Seth Holt, and, after I’d spent a whole year on a Bell & Howell foot joiner and several more months on a Moy numbering machine, I became his second assistant. Seth, unlike most of the editors, was an intellectual. He had started as an actor, and I don’t recall how he rose in the ranks at Ealing, since he was still quite young. I suspect, however, that it was because Seth was related to Robert Hamer, the Ealing director who had made Kind Hearts and Coronets. Seth gave me my break as his second assistant on a now forgotten comedy The Love Lottery in which David Niven was directed by Charles Crichton.
* * *
It was during the shooting of this picture that I met my first wife, Jessie Holling, who was Crichton’s secretary. She was only twenty-four but already a widow with a child. Her husband, David Holling, had fallen into the Thames and drowned. Jessie originally became involved with David when he was a young scenic artist, working at Pinewood Studios. They had a fling, she became pregnant, and they married. She never spoke very much about him after he drowned. It was clear that nobody made an effort to rescue him, and I later gathered that he was a drunk and disliked by most people. Perhaps she felt relief that he had gone.
She now lived in Ealing with her elderly parents. Her mother, a Russian who never mastered English, looked after her son, Andrew, who was two. Her father, an Englishman, worked for the Inland Revenue. These were difficult times for her family, and Jessie and I, being co-workers, were often thrown together, mostly in the Queen Victoria Pub across the road.
At that time, all the younger cutting room people used to go out drinking together. One thing led to another and Jessie and I began an affair. It was my first, at twenty-one and, being a late starter, I soon discovered that movies were not the only route to happiness.
I was a regular at a special shop in Ealing that sold prophylactics. There were separate entrances for men and women. On entering I would be greeted by a man dressed in a spotless white lab coat. He would ask me what I required. “A dozen of the best,” I would reply and he’d take from under the counter a cardboard box and a rigid piece of wood resembling an erect phallus. Then each condom would be rolled onto this device, a burst of air would inflate it, and the assistant would then wave the balloon over his face to test for leaks. He would go through the entire dozen in this manner no matter how many customers were waiting in line. I soon discovered that asking for twelve was always embarrassing.
I visited Jessie’s parents frequently and became fond of her little boy, who was chatty and lively, but the relationship was riddled with friction. Jessie was given to tantrums, which I found very difficult to cope with. After six months, Jessie and I split up.
I went on to another film at Ealing and, although I saw Jessie almost every day, we rarely spoke. It was, therefore, a dreadful shock to learn from a third party that Jessie’s mother had died and Andrew had been placed in a Catholic home in Brighton. I called Jessie directly and learned the whole story. It was not pleasant and she was deeply troubled by her situation—having to continue working to support herself and the child. She visited Andrew every Saturday. Having a car, I suggested I should drive her to Brighton the next weekend.
When I saw Andrew in the hall of the home where he’d been placed, I was very upset. This little boy who had formerly been active and chatty was now a thin, withdrawn figure who didn’t utter a word when we took him out walking along the pier. I was confronted with a situation that I felt inadequate to address. Nothing had prepared me for this but I felt it was necessary to act. However irrationally, I knew I could not return Andrew to that home where he was, clearly, deeply unhappy and, yet, I did not have an alternative that made any sense. There was no real relationship between Jessie and myself. We had split months before and were not in love though we enjoyed one another’s company. Jessie was often volatile, and I wouldn’t have called her a good mother. Andrew was often screamed at and clouted on the head. She did love him, however, and she and Andrew were obviously suffering. I felt that I had to do something to help, so instead of driving them back to the home, I took them to Ealing where I deposited the child with his grandfather then took Jessie to dinner at a cafe on Richmond Bridge and proposed marriage.
Totally crazy though it was, it seemed the only way of keeping Andrew and his mother together. My parents were mystified and the Booths worried that I was making a major error.
Curiously I was not worried at all and even rather enjoyed this fuss. I arranged to move in with Jessie, Andrew, and her father and we all lived together in a small terraced house in Creighton Road, Ealing, while Jessie and I continued to work at the studio.
Because she was a Catholic, Jessie wanted to marry in a church of her choice. My mother, being staunch Church of England, was outraged. I asked my old Boston friend Chris Sharpe to be my best man.
The day of the wedding arrived. Jessie went into a funk and refused to get up and go to the church. Chris and I, with the aid of numerous tots of brandy, finally hauled her out of bed, got her into a dress and to the church where we had kept the guests waiting.
We had a reasonably happy life afterward, continuing much as before, though we could now afford to have Andrew cared for during the day. It wasn’t long before Jessie was pregnant, and Kate was born in 1956. It was clear that the house was no longer large enough to hold us all, so I bought another home in Ealing on Warwick Road, which was nondescript but big.
Life with Jessie was seldom tranquil. She was not a natural mother, being subject to fits of temper that were often hard to accept. After she quit working to stay home and look after both children, she mellowed considerably. Having two children to attend to absorbed her, but it wasn’t long before she was pregnant again.
* * *
By this time I was gaining some ground at the studio, busy most of the year, rarely out of work and I had been made an “assistant” to Jack Harris, who would be crucial to my future career and development. Jack had started out in silent films. He’d had a long tenure at Twickenham Studios where he supervised film editing in the thirties. He had immense experience and he’d cut a lot of films for David Lean. As his assistant, I was very interested in his working methods. Jack was a terribly slow thinker. If you asked him a question, you had to wait at least five minutes for the answer.
Jack was both painstaking and non-intellectual. He was more interested in his garden than anything else. Very tall and thin, he smoked like a chimney. In fact, we used to worry that the ash would fall off his cigarette into the trim bin and set everything on fire. You weren’t supposed to smoke in the cutting room at all because the film was so flammable. Jack never did actually cause a fire.
When Jack had a scene to cut, he would ponder the material endlessly. He would never begin thinking about the cuts until he had all the material to hand. He’d have the rushes on a spool-loading Moviola. There would be ten minutes of film on a reel that he would run backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, incessantly for a day or so. It used to drive us all crazy because, it seemed to us, he was never going to cut the film. As an assistant, you’d be sitting there, just dying for him to stop the machine, take it off the Moviola, put it on the synchroniser, and actually make a cut. He would just keep spooling in a silence you could carve with a knife.
Jack was a very mild mannered man, but he did require that his assistants behave themselves. If there was too much noise, he would turn and say “Hey, Cocky! Be quiet!” One always knew when Jack was angry since the “Cocky” word was only uttered when he was disturbed. Normally, while concentrating on the rushes, he would not speak and nor would we.
Finally,
