he knew that he had lost all faith in his ability to do it.
Called in for his audition, he walked over to his spot, still clutching his packet of cheese sandwiches absent-mindedly to his chest, and then, sensing that he was having some trouble in keeping still, looked down and noticed that his left leg had started to tremble. The more he tried to stop it, the worse the quivering became. When he looked up in embarrassment at the examiners (one of whom â the imperious actor Helen Haye â he recognised immediately as the haughty wife of the master villain in Alfred Hitchcockâs recent movie, The 39 Steps), he found that they were all staring back not at his face but straight down at his leg. Panicking, he took his right hand (which remained wrapped around his squashed packet of sandwiches) and slammed it down hard and fast against his left knee, praying that the violent gesture would at least bring the shaking to a stop.
It did not. The hand did not stop the knee; the knee started the hand. All that the attempt to end the action achieved was to provide the row of open-mouthed examiners with the even more peculiar spectacle of a crumpled young man and what was left of his crumpled sandwiches being shaken ever more wildly by a wildly shaking left leg. It looked a bit like a dance, and a bit like an exorcism, and a bit like a fit, but it was definitely a disaster. When, eventually, his leg, and the rest of him, finally came to a halt, his sandwiches had showered the examiners in a mixture of shredded cheese and breadcrumbs, and his suit was in almost as bad a shape as his frazzled nerves.
âBegin,â he was told, and so, red-faced and reluctantly, he did: âYes ⦠Well ⦠Um ⦠To-to-to ⦠er be ⦠or not-not-not to ⦠um ⦠Yes, well ⦠To be ⦠Well, thatâs the question, isnât it? â¦â He was well aware that it was already over, right there and then, but, somehow, he struggled on to the bitter end: âI should have thrown up my hands and run for my life,â he would recall, âbut beneath the panic lay that hard subsoil of determination, and so I stumbled and stammered and squeaked and shook my way through all of the three set pieces.â14
They thanked him. He thanked them. He went out. The next candidate came in. The grey day turned black.
Howard spent the train journey home slumped deep inside âan anguish of desolation and shameâ: âIâd let everyone down: my mother, my headmaster, my schoolmates, Mary Hope â and myself. I was a complete and utter failure.â15 When he arrived back in Eltham, he found that he simply could not bear to face anyone, not even his mother, and so he went instead to a field at the back of his house, where he sat down in the long grass and started to sob. âNever before or since,â he would say, âhave I wept as I did on that day.â16
He stayed there for two blank and miserable hours. Eventually, however, once the sobbing had stopped and the tears had started to dry, a bright thought burst through the gloom. Perhaps, he reflected, he had not reached the end at all, but had merely taken a wrong turn. Sitting bolt upright, he then said to himself:
Youâre a fool. A fool ⦠You must have courage. Courage. The way youâre behaving is absolutely gutless ⦠Look, you believe in God, donât you? And you know that God seems to have given you talent. You feel that to be true ⦠Now God is logical. He must be, otherwise life is stupid. Pointless. Without meaning ⦠OK, perhaps RADA and straight acting arenât for you. What then is the alternative?17
It did not take long for this characteristically brusque internal inquisition to summon up an acceptable response: âComedy? Is that the alternative? If youâre not meant to be a great Shakespearean, are you meant to be a comedian? Is that it? ⦠Why not try and see?â18
There seemed only one answer to such a question, and that was: why not, indeed? âI didnât have anything to lose,â he concluded, âexcept my pride â and that was wounded enough already after such a traumatic day.â19
He got up, dusted himself down and walked home, where his worried mother had been waiting most of the afternoon for her son to return. When he told her tearfully about his terrible day, she just held him for a while and gave him a consoling kiss on the cheek. When, a little later, he hinted at his belief that his âcallingâ was now, yet again, about to change, and that this time it was set to be a career in comedy, she simply assured him that she still had âan unswerving faithâ in the inevitability of his eventual success.20 Sensing how badly the fallen St Francis felt that he had already let her down, she did all that she could to discourage any further growth in guilt: âAs long as youâre kind and decent,â she stressed, âI donât care what you do.â21
According to the neat dramatic myth engendered by the memoirs, what the 16-year-old Howard did next was to leave school (âIâd betrayed the faith theyâd had in me there: the Actor was now the Flop. No, I couldnât go backâ22) and find a job while he waited impatiently for the arrival of some kind of bountiful show-business break. The unromantic truth, however, is that he returned to Shooters Hill, subdued and semi-detached, and, reluctantly but dutifully, saw out the last two years of his secondary education.23 Although his academic studies never recovered (he would leave with only a solitary school certificate to count as a qualification), his actorly ebullience most certainly did: according to the fond recollections of one of his contemporaries,24 Howard managed not only to strengthen his reputation as a much-talked-about âcharacterâ, but also somehow contrived to âbring the house downâ with his portrayal of The Wall in the schoolâs 1935 production of âPyramus and Thisbeâ (the play-within-a-play from Shakespeareâs A Midsummer Nightâs Dream).
When, at long last, the day approached when he really was able to leave â at the start of the summer of 1935 â he intended to start scouring the local area for the kind of relatively well-paid but undemanding short-term job that would complement a young manâs pursuit of a career in comedy. Before, however, he even had the chance to commence such a fanciful plan, his father died, on 12 May, and all of a sudden Frank Jnr, at the tender age of eighteen, found himself elevated to the position of the senior male in the Howard household.
Out of desperation, he took a menial job as a filing clerk with a firm by the name of Henry A. Lane, Provisions and Produce, at 37â45 Tooley Street in the East End borough of Southwark. The work was dull and the pay was poor (just £1 per week, which was meagre even for those days), and the only solace that Frank would find was within the walls of the nearby cathedral, where he spent most of his free time either sitting alone in prayer or sometimes listening to recitals.
He lived and longed for the evenings, when he could still feel, at least for an hour or two, that he was pushing on with his âproperâ ambitions: performing in local plays, pageants, concert parties, benefits, balls and revues â anything, in fact, that seemed to carry even the slightest scent of show business. He not only remained a keen contributor to the various productions put on by his colleagues at the local church, but he was also now an extremely active member of the Shooters Hill Old Boysâ Dramatic Society (where he was free to test his acting talents on slightly more challenging forms of fare).
Not
