to give a performance.
I wonder what it was like.
We found a flat in London where you filled the bath with a hosepipe from the kitchen tap. We were happy and in modest employment. My new husband took a job as a ‘day man’ backstage at Sadler’s Wells.
Two years later, we had our daughter Emma. It was April. Just in time for the holidays. We had a phone call from Ma. ‘I’ve taken a house on the Clyde,’ she announced, like an Edwardian matron. ‘I want the baby to start life in good fresh air.’
The weather was appalling. The sea and the sky merged in battleship grey, chucking water at the windows, and our landlady was an alcoholic, who hid our cheques and had regular visits from the police. We took our tin-can car along the purple ribbon of a road that led to the village of Arden-tinny, asking at every BandB if they had room for us. They did, but they were too expensive. Then the wind changed and the weather was sublime. We stopped at the Primrose tea-rooms in the village for an ice-cream, and I sat on the jetty with the baby, dangling my feet in the loch and nibbling a choc ice.
My husband wandered away down the village street to find the phone box, saying that Mrs Moffat in the tea-rooms had told him there were rooms to let in a cottage close by. I had barely finished my ice when he came thundering back down the road at uncharacteristic speed. ‘We’ve got it,’ he said. ‘It’s five pounds for a fortnight. Go and look. Give me Em.’ As I left he called, ‘It’s not the prettiest cottage. It’s the one next door.’
Well – The prettiest cottage was empty.
The prettiest cottage was for sale.
The prettiest cottage was exactly what Uncle Arthur and Ma had been searching for for more than a decade.
We pooled our resources and bought it.
The cottage has had nine lives already. Mother and Uncle Arthur outgrew it and moved to an old manse a short trot along the shore road, where they cultivated their vegetable patch and their soft-fruit cage.
In their eighties it became too much for them. Should they move back to the cottage?
Mother was excited.
Uncle Arthur was depressed.
Moving house didn’t help, I suppose. The idea to scale down and live in the cottage had been mooted, applauded and discarded at my every visit, year after year. The morning room became a dump for ‘stuff’. Old mattresses, an ancient TV, worn-out bedding and pillows, old saucepans and a toaster, a gramophone, gardening tools, two fishing rods and one galosh.
Mother’s confidence was gradually dented by falls on the stairs, with coffee in one hand and a portable wireless in the other. Uncle Arthur just fell down backwards. Then there was the discovery we made, while investigating a damp patch in Ma’s bedroom, that the roof void was full of bats. They would squeeze through a chink in the plaster round one kitchen pipe and very slowly move down, paw over paw, till Uncle Arthur caught them in a dishcloth and threw them out. Any remarks about protected species did not go down well.
He was ruthless with mice. He put stuff under the sink that looked like black treacle and the mice got stuck in it, like flies on fly-paper, whereupon he lifted them by the tail and flushed them down the outside loo. And that was another thing: no downstairs loo, except the one outside. Tricky.
Then there was the car and the undoubted skill needed to park it off the road and up the steep drive, then some very dodgy manoeuvres to get down again. And there was the time they were struck by lightning. Both phones blew off the wall, filling the house with acrid smoke, and four neat triangular flaps appeared on the lawn, as if someone had lifted the turf with a sharp blade. Spooky.
That New Year the Rayburn exploded. The kitchen walls and every surface were coated with black oil that took three days to lift, and Uncle Arthur, trying to be helpful, threw himself on to the fire in the sitting room along with a log. Sage discussions took place over arnica and quite a lot of whisky. They would move to the cottage in the spring, they agreed, but by the time I left for London, the kitchen was as good as new and they had changed their minds. There was no question of their ever leaving the old place.
That very week I signed a contract to appear in La Cage aux Folles at the London Palladium.
Exciting!
Mother rang that evening.
They had sold the house. It was a bad moment. I don’t sob a lot – well, I do now, perhaps, but I didn’t then. Too vain. My nose would swell to the size of a light bulb. It still does, but now I don’t care.
My agent must have been surprised to hear me on the phone after hours and inarticulate, hiccuping with shock.
‘This is not some flibbertigibbet actressy thing,’ I managed to yelp. ‘This is serious.’ She took it as such, tried to get me released and failed. The American producers said I would have to pay for all the printed publicity if I left, but I would be allowed to negotiate a week’s holiday to include Easter weekend, which extended it a little. My stand-in was alerted and I bet she was good. No one complained. They didn’t miss me at all. That’s always a worry.
Mother greeted the news of my foray into musical theatre with real delight. Also, she and Uncle Arthur actually seemed excited about their early move. I hadn’t bargained for this burst of energy. They were like teenagers, walloping into the Bulgarian plonk and spending happy hours throwing unwanted belongings into the morning room, then taking them back.
Their lovely garden was now less of a burden and seemed, perversely, to flourish on neglect. The vegetable patch was declared redundant and the soft-fruit cage dismantled. Any leaks in the roof were belittled. It only leaks when it rains and the wind is in the wrong direction, they said. Well, Uncle Arthur said. He didn’t want to worry the new owners.
I learnt a great lesson from all this. When you’re old, as I am now, you must have a ‘project’. It can be quite modest, but you must have one. It creates a future for you. It lifts the spirits.
Mine were lifted, too, by riotous rehearsals. I love dancers. I love their energy, their discipline and their courage. And besides all of that, the chorus in Cage were funny.
I had a small part and a huge dressing room, which was, apparently, half of Anna Neagle’s when she’d played the Palladium. Just along the corridor there was an even larger dressing room filled with male dancers dressed appealingly in cami-knickers, bras, high heels and a large amount of make-up.
Between shows on Wednesday, they organised competitions for, let’s say, the most original contents of a handbag. The Best Hat Award was won, I remember, by a dancer wearing a wide-brimmed bush hat decorated with tampons.
I wondered about our Christmas tree.
On occasion, two dancers in improvised nursing outfits, carrying salad servers, would demand
