Edith Holler, page 4
Clack, clack, clackety clack clack. The machine from Leadenhall Street grew very hot. The knock of my typewriter was very much like the knock of a deathwatch beetle.
I wrote my secret into a play.
I gave my secret voice.
It came out so easily!
I assembled my cast, I ordered my scenes. This must happen and then this and then this, I proclaimed. The cathedral, the castle, older even than Maw Meg, would give witness. All those forgotten children would speak at last, I gave them words with my typewriter. I must give the facts and let the story grow more and more urgent, until at last all bursts out. Part One the introduction, Part Two things are going wrong, Part Three it only gets worse, Part Four all seems lost, Part Five the great calamity.
Every name that I had found now found its way into my play. I should have the Mawther, too, upon the stage, dark and dangerous. Have they been frightened before now of Richard III, of the ogre in “Puss in Boots,” of Frankenstein’s creature? Ah, but they were nothing yet. Here is new villainy. The adults will sit there in their seats, before my play, those men and women of Norwich, and see what had been happening all along as they slept in their beds. I would wake them up at last! I saw it all coming, all the letters obeying my command, all the keys of Leadenhall Street, one after the other, stamped onto the page, the pages mounting up. Here and here and here. So dizzy with the letting out of it.
I knew, by how easily it came, that I must be right to undertake it, as if my secret were writing the play for me. This, I declared to myself, must be performed for my thirteenth birthday. I would finally speak to Norwich and at last they would hear me. Two months only it took, hammering away at Leadenhall, and then I presented the manuscript to Father, leaving him alone with the pages as I closed his door behind me. How it terrified me to be so separated from my work. What if there were an accident and the manuscript be set alight? What if he should take it out into Norwich and leave it upon a park bench, only to retrace his steps and find it gone? What if he left it upon a tram, one of those new metal dragons in which the common people of Norwich are moved about the city? I did fear for it so, you see, my child of ink, that truth on paper.
But Father, being Father, never took it out of his study. He stayed with it there, the two of them the only company. At last he called for me and I quickly came, my heart yearning to take flight over Norwich like one of my paper messages.
“Edith, Edith. What is this?” Father had been crying, though he tried not to show it.
“It is a play, Father.”
“Edith, what strangeness. Has it made you ill, the writing of this . . . business?”
“In truth, Father, I have never felt better nor more myself.”
“It is a wonder you found the strength. A full five acts here.”
“Yes, Father.”
“It is an outrage, I think you know that.”
“Is it?”
“So many disappearances, so many deaths. Must there be?”
“Yes, Father, that is essential.”
“I do wonder over the darkness of it.”
“It must be so.”
“But do you mean it?”
“Completely, every word. I can only say it in the play. I couldn’t say it to you, Father, not like this. I wouldn’t know how. But I could with the typewriter. The words lead me on, I can do it with the words.”
“Such a quiet girl, I thought.”
“I am an explosion!”
“And it is very bold—indeed, you are grown so bold.”
“I am. I am!”
“But you are not serious?”
“Am I not?”
“What will Norwich make of it, to have itself as such an outrageous subject?”
“I cannot say, Father.”
“You will offend people, I fear. Uttings in particular are unlikely to be happy.”
“I cannot help that.”
“Of course we may pass it off as nonsense. As fairy tale.”
“Are fairy tales nonsense?”
“No, no. And yet, Edith, the play is a story, surely, a tale of Norwich. Children missing, yes, this is very good. But . . .” And here he paused. “Just—not the Spread, I think, Edith. Something else, perhaps, without losing its drama. Children missing is enough; missing is good. Yes, then it might be done.”
“But I meant what I wrote.”
“Ah yes. No doubt. But we may preserve your intention without being quite so . . . direct. Even improve it. Subtext, my darling. But otherwise, what an extraordinary sensation we might cause! A Norwich play! Why indeed not have Norwich upon the stage? For we are Norwich and everyone about us. To have ourselves on a stage! To see ourselves the better! It shall certainly draw attention. People will be very curious. They will come pouring in!”
I saw Father’s growing excitement, and imagined with him the reaction of Norwich. We have had, over the years, a horse or two upon our stage, and how the audience did gasp at it—strange that a horse on the street causes the people no reaction, but to have the animal onstage is a thing of great wonder, even if it is the same horse. As if we, my family, had invented the animal. It is all about the context.
I looked at Father; he held the manuscript to him.
“I think perhaps after all we might perform it. A version of it.”
“My play! Really? My play!”
“There will be adjustments, of course. Changes. You lose your way often enough, and there is much repetition, the accusations must be withdrawn and merely suggested, and we must most of all be certain it connects to us here today, that it speaks properly to the people of Norwich.”
“There is much Norwich in it, is there not, Father?”
“Yes, indeed, you have studied well. But there needs to be love, there should be romance. People of Norwich like that. Some sort of love, Edith, even if it is only for a piece of cloth.”
“Must we?”
“To hook them, Edith.”
“If only for a piece of cloth. Yes, Father. Some love indeed. Of course I can do love.”
“Can you?”
“Certainly, Father.”
“What knowledge do you have of it?”
“I have seen it often, upon the stage.”
“Very well. We shall begin rehearsals in a month.”
“A month! A month!”
“I shall make an announcement for it, alongside the next season. Not a full run, mind you, Edith. We must see how it goes down. A Monday performance, say. In case it fails. A play may fail, Edith—you know that, I think.”
“I understand.”
“And, Edith?”
“Yes, Father.”
“You are so clever! My own daughter!”
* * *
• • •
In the following weeks, an advertisement appeared in the newspaper, and soon after it was on the bill posters for the coming season:
THE TRUE HISTORY OF MAWTHER MEG
by Edith M. Holler, the child who may not leave the theatre
I have the bill posters on the wall of my room, two of them glued there like any other on an outside Norwich street wall, the kind where missing children notices have long been posted. I am a playwright. I tell the stories. Father has proclaimed it and thus it is.
“Now, Edith,” said Father, very serious, “your characters have come into life. Now they have independent living. I read your play, and so it exists doubly, and more and more people shall read it. They are abroad, your characters. Your play exists without you now. There is no putting it back.” And it was so. Others, beyond the theatre walls, took notice. Said the Eastern Daily Press: the silent child on theatre street speaks at last! edith holler has written a play.
At around this time, Mr. Shrubsole from Davey Place came to the theatre, with his long-legged companion that is a tripod. I was instructed to get dressed into my best outfit; my hair was tidied up and pinned at the back. The fuss they made, taming me into a smart gown, constricted beneath it by a corset and with a bustle tied around my waist. They were to take a picture of me with my manuscript: Edith Holler, authoress.
I have seen the picture. Is it me? I suppose it must be, yet it is not quite how I picture myself. How smart she is. In the picture she is touching the manuscript that has been to Jarrold & Sons and copied many times over, so that the play duplicated many times must be safe now. The photograph has a cardboard mount that says PATRONS H. M. THE QUEEN AND THEIR R.H.s THE PRINCE & PRINCESS OF WALES—which is wrong of course, but Mr. Shrubsole is still using his old stock because the cardboard thinks the queen is still alive, and no one has told it. Still, to see that photograph is to feel almost attached to royalty myself, to sense that the monarch is just around the corner.
Yet all that was weeks ago. I have not seen Father since Mr. Shrubsole. He is often busy, but lately he has spent more time away from the theatre, out there in Norwich. His top hat is absent, and his best jacket. He’ll call for me again soon no doubt, he does love me so. And in his absence I have felt myself drawn to our stage, have heard it calling me, and so on this evening, 20 March 1901, the stage empty between seasons, the old brick wall at its back now fully exposed, I have visited it.
Back wall of a card theatre.
Stage floor of a card theatre.
* * *
• • •
What space it is, our stage. I had lived my life in its proximity, yet now that I was to see my own words take life upon it, I felt we must know one another even better. And so, to try to gain a feeling of it, to test what personality it had when not wearing the character of one play or another—to know it as it really is, that great open space, that contained field, that everywhere—I took myself to it, and I undressed myself. After a minute, stood barefoot in the center, I seemed to learn something of it. Cold at first, biting cold, but my own heat soon warmed the wood a little. As I stood and stood, it seemed to tremble beneath me. What a thing it was, what a greed it had. I could feel myself sinking into it. My skin on its surface going down. Very slowly it was taking me in, I was becoming stage myself. Soon I was up to my ankles in it, then my calves and then my waist, falling ever farther into the stage. I was drowning in it. It had taken all of me, until I was nothing at all, nothing left to show of me, as if I had never been.
Yet, very fortunately for me, Aunt Jenny Garner (she isn’t really my aunt, but I call her so) happened to be in the wings, and she had a lanthorn with her, and soon was pulling me back with her light and I was myself again and shivering. She wrapped me in her shawl and we sat together and I held on to her like my life depended upon it.
“I felt it alive!”
“It is, my darling. Of course it is.”
“It nearly had me.”
“It will do that.”
“I’m frightened of it now.”
“No harm in being a little frightened, no harm at all, Edith. Everyone is frightened of something, and a little fear can be a good thing. Can sharpen the performance, see? But too much is a disaster. Why do you think Mr. Fenwick no longer goes on?”
“Is it the stage fright?”
“Oh, to see him weeping in the wings, taking hold of some rope or flat as if it might save him from drowning! Like Gloucester, he feels the cliff edge, even if many do tell him it is not there, and he horrors at the approaching tumble. Even he, Mr. Herbert Fenwick, who made himself famous as Cinna the poet in Julius Caesar, who was so alarmingly bitter as Thersites in Troilus and Cressida and so sad and moving as John of Gaunt in Richard II. Even he, poor Fenwick, has been bitten so badly by the stage that he can no longer step upon it, for fear that if he did he shall be drowned dead.”
Uncle Wilfred and the carpenters had solved Mr. Fenwick’s problem by building a ramp on the stage from the stalls, so that, while playing the ghost of Old Hamlet, he might walk through the audience and stand upon the ramp. It was a wonderful effect. And thus he managed, so long as he never needed to tread upon the actual stage.
“What do I do now, Aunt? Now that I am a playwright and almost grown up?”
“This is what you do, and you do it from now on. Perhaps every day for the rest of your life. You stand on the stage and you tell it your name.”
And so I did. And, back in my old smock and boots, I said the words that I shall spill upon the stage daily:
“It is Edith here. Hello. I am Edith May Holler, the theatre’s daughter, the playwright. This is my world, and I am in charge of it.”
3.
I am called to my father.
On the first day of the great change upon my life, I awoke at ten o’clock. I did not yet know of the change, but nevertheless it was coming swiftly. It was Aunt Bleachy who woke me. The sharp smell came first, every bit as vinegar as the words that followed.
“Your father!” she barked. And then: “The Mourning Room!”
I sat up in bed, already in a worry. “The Mourning Room? It cannot be good news if it is the Mourning Room. What is wrong, Aunt Bleachy?”
“Here’s your dress. Enter it.”
There was never any getting around my aunt Bleachy. She is tough and raw-skinned. Her real name is Belinda, but we all call her Bleachy. She is the aunt who mops the stage side of the theatre. She does never go front of house, but is in charge of the cleanliness this side, the backstage side. She is a monster woman and curses everyone. But in her day she was the very best Helena that ever was, everyone says so, the most beautiful Viola, the most wonderful of actresses, her voice a most exquisite instrument, capable of inducing tears with just a sentence. She was in love once, it is said, with a handsome actor, and they were to marry, but he fell for Hermia instead and so my aunt Bleachy went toward bleach and drank some and nearly died, and ever since she has been with the bleach. She curses the stage, she scrubs it, she slaps it about and kicks it, she pours bleach on everything, and at every stage of the process she is a fearful unhappy person. She hates the theatre, but does live here, in order to give it, one scrape at a time, the full attention of her hatred. Sometimes, in her thoroughness, small pieces of the stage come loose and tumble to the floor below, and then Bleachy is known to laugh.
Aunty Bleachy has a small army of Norwich girls and women who come in to help her, and she makes them all unhappy, for she has only unhappiness about her and nothing else to offer.
“Come along, will you?”
Aunt Bleachy had me out of my bedroom and downstairs. She stopped me at the step just before the Mourning Room.
“Wait here,” said the Bleach.
“Is Father inside?” I asked.
“Wait,” said the Bleach.
“Why has he summoned me? Is my play canceled?” I asked.
“No special treatment,” said the Bleach.
Exit the Bleach.
* * *
• • •
I sat upon the step waiting for Father, who was just beyond. My father who is big and strange and all living. My father who is tall and dark and strong weather. Thunder and lightning and thick fog. He may be lovely and he may be horrible, but whichever he is, it is always a spectacle. When he keeps still and does nothing, how we wonder over it. Everything he does is fascinating. When he enters a room, it is his utterly; people look only to him. When he blows his nose, it is more exciting than another man’s whole Macbeth.
Father had to take on the responsibility of the theatre as a very young man, and that is what has made him great. His own father, my grandfather Richard, was broken by the stage. Unlike Victor Holler, my great-grandfather, Richard had no talent for it, he mismanaged everything, and in revenge the theatre bullied him until he could bear it no longer. By the end, it is said, everything frightened him, and he was taken across Theatre Street to the Bethel Hospital. It was supposed to be only for a week or two, but the weeks spread to months and thence to years and he never came back out again. The theatre nearly went bankrupt—until Father, only eighteen years old, stood up and swore to his grandfather, who was dying by then, that he would save the theatre. I never knew either man, great-grandfather or grandfather. It was for Father alone to save all. (Of my grandmothers I have nothing to tell, for they never figured in anyone’s stories. I have often worried over that.)
I have been the cause of sadness as well as delight for my father. My mother, as in a comedy perhaps, went out as I came in. Or one might say that, like the Fool and Cordelia, we may not be onstage at the same time. My father loved her terribly. The doctor was called to her in the theatre, so sudden did she take ill, and soon after came her death and then the curse that quickly followed. Ever since then, Father has walked with death. Carrying me in his arms—blue grey and scrawny as I was, in a soiled christening gown—he made an apartment of the upstairs offices, and we moved into the theatre permanently.
In Father’s drawing room, there is a likeness of my mother. She is playing Joan of Arc in the picture, Joan on her way to the burning, just as they used to hang witches here (and also the persecuted Protestants known as Lollards), over in the old chalk pit behind the Bridge Inn—O Norwich you are bathed in blood. Mother looks like she is very with God. I cannot tell how much of the picture reveals my mother and how much it reveals Joan of Arc. Somewhere certainly under Joan is my mother; my mother is still herself to an extent, I suppose, even when she is Joan. Perhaps I go about this a little backwardly. I was talking of my father and my mother’s limited likeness came into my eyes at once and Father, for a brief moment, receded. And that was only right perhaps, for Father was everyone and, sometimes, no one at all.
