Being Boycie, page 5
Working in Leatherhead did have a few advantages over Ashtead, including the presence of the original Leatherhead Theatre, where I saw several shows. By far the most notable was a production of Ian Rodger’s Cromwell at Drogheda, starring one of the great thespian knights of the time, Sir Donald Wolfit, as Cromwell. Before I saw the play, I had seen the great man a few times strolling up and down the broad streets of Leatherhead, wearing a spotless Homburg and astrakhan collared coat, with a silver-topped cane. He pushed his obvious personal presence before him like a bow wave as he progressed along the street, stopping every so often to admire his reflection in a shop window. But this didn’t prepare me for his extraordinary stage presence. When he made his entrance, it was as if every other player on the stage was blown away, evaporated or shrunk in stature. It was the power of this performance as much as anything that implanted in me a real sense of purpose about becoming an actor, and increased my frustration with the job I was doing.
My boss, who lived for estate agency and with whom I got on pretty well, was observant enough to be aware of this.
‘Let’s face it, John,’ he said to me after I’d been there about three months, ‘your heart’s not really in the job it, is it?’
I couldn’t deny it, and although I knew what ructions it would cause at home, we agreed that it was probably time for me to move on... to what, I had no clue.
There were ructions at home. My father was furious and dished out some bitter assessments of my character and my unsatisfactory ambitions.
‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ I asked him, more or less aware that I needed direction, like a lot of young men of eighteen.
‘I don’t care if you’re a bus driver,’ he fumed, ‘as long as you’re a good one.’
In order to keep his anger at bay, I went straight out to find work for myself – anything to show him I was trying – and talked my way into a job delivering orders for Hudsons of Epsom, the local grocer. This brought a little respite from my father’s harassing and at least gave me the chance to drive around the villages in the grocer’s van, stopping off to drink tea and talk cricket with a succession of middle-aged housewives.
In the meantime, I was getting to play some music. I’d made friends with another local rock’n’roll enthusiast, Tony Instone. We played together a little and managed to get a few gigs at village halls and a church fete in a vicarage garden.
This hadn’t developed any further when I met three other guys and formed a more folksy band with them – three guitars, a banjo and drums – called the Dustbowl Refugees. In this guise we managed to get a few better gigs than I was used to, on a circuit of South London pubs, and the high point of the band’s career was reached at a gargantuan boozer in Stanmore, where we played the interval between sets by Terry Lightfoot’s Jazzmen.
Tony Instone and I carried on hanging about together, and we used to go up to London to sit around in Soho coffee bars, like the ghoulish Macabre in Meard Street, where the tables were coffins, and skeletons dangled in corners, the Cat’s Whiskers or the 2i’s, which had set the scene for an early Cliff Richard movie, Expresso Bongo, and where the Vipers were then the house band. These places got so packed (not to say sweaty and malodorous) that there wasn’t always room to dance, and the punters would practise instead what became known as the hand jive – just moving the hands and forearms in time to the music, which must, at least, have kept the sweat level down a bit.
Tony got to know a lot of the musicians we came across in those early expeditions to the West End, and even at that stage it was obvious that he was determined somehow to make his way into the music business. He soon got himself a job in the industry as a song plugger for Essex Music and moved full-time to London. I rather lost touch with him after that, when my own life also took a critical turn.
It was towards the end of 1961, I was nineteen and I knew I wasn’t cut out for a career in grocery, any more than estate agency. Like a lot of feckless youths, I was still trying to identify a job that would accommodate my idea of fun and my innate idleness, when I came home one evening to Sunnybank and my mother excitedly announced that she was going to introduce me to a friend who knew the assistant to Michael Macowan. Macowan was a former actor and well-known theatre director who, since 1954, had been head of the London Academy of Music and Drama, or LAMDA, one of the country’s leading stage schools. As a keen thesp herself, my mother had loved my appearances in the school plays and in Twelfth Night, and she was by no means opposed to my taking up acting as a career, as long as I had a strategy of some sort. I think she felt that a formal training at one of the great drama schools would give me this, as well as a clearer idea of what I wanted to do.
While my father listened in stony silence, it was arranged that I would go for a preliminary audition with Michael Macowan’s assistant, and we set off for a nondescript office in Coulsdon. Here I had an informal, as it were preliminary, audition with two people I’d only just met. Inevitably the meeting kicked off with a lecture on the incredible insecurities of the profession, and how absolute dedication to the theatre was essential. ‘Absolute dedication’ didn’t sound much fun to me, nevertheless I happily performed a speech from The School for Scandal which I’d learned at school. They evidently liked what they saw, and I was told that if I applied in the normal way for entry to LAMDA, I would very likely get in.
That was exciting in a way – flattering, at least, if only I’d realised it when my mother was busy taking credit for her son’s talents – but I couldn’t see how learning about the theory of acting was going to help me. From what I’d seen among the boys in school plays and the members of the Tadworth Players, either you could do it, or you couldn’t; and in any case, the idea of at least three more years effectively ‘at school’, with people telling me what to do all the time, appalled me. I was already gathering my things to leave the room while my mother was promising she would get me along to an audition.
The next day, I was back in the real world and the grocer’s van, but the reaction of the people who’d auditioned me – people involved in the real theatre – had fired up my determination to look further afield for opportunities to get a proper acting job. So as soon as the next issue of The Stage, the theatre trade paper, appeared in the Epsom newsagents, I made sure I got one. Leafing through this publication the following weekend, I spotted an advertisement on the back page for an actor with a schools touring theatre company. The number to ring was quite nearby, in Purley. This seemed like a good omen, and an opportunity not to pass up, despite everyone telling me how impossible it was to find work as an actor, especially without training. (My father also used to warn me how much time I would have to spend doing nothing between jobs, which seemed to me a positively attractive aspect of the job). I sometimes wonder if the address had been in Hampstead or somewhere equally inaccessible, if I would have bothered.
As it was I rang the number and a friendly woman asked me a few questions before inviting me to come over to Purley for an audition the next day. My parents were away on holiday and hadn’t taken their car, so I borrowed it and drove myself to the appointment.
The interview was held on a winter’s day in a fairly plain semi in an undistinguished street of the Surrey suburb. Another hopeful was leaving just as I set off up the path to the front door. My immediate reaction, as it was for some years to come, was that he was taller, more handsome, more composed and altogether more suitable for the job than me. The door was opened with a friendly greeting by a middle-aged, housewifely sort. She led me into a small front room brimming with aspidistras, stagy pictures of actors, stacks of old playbills and dog-eared copies of Spotlight and The Stage. This woman didn’t strike me as being remotely theatrical, but she put me at my ease and asked me what I’d done.
With hindsight, I realise it was my theatrical experience she was asking about, but I was quite naive and didn’t have a clue.
‘Oh, this and that,’ I said, trying to sound amusingly sophisticated and blasé. ‘You know, a spot of estate agenting, but I got rather bored with that... then I did a bit of grocery delivery. A few shows with my skiffle group, tennis in the summer....’ I faded, conscious that I wasn’t perhaps stressing the right experience.
‘Acting?’ my interviewer prompted.
‘Oh yes, I played Feste in Twelfth Night.’
Her ears pricked up. ‘Oh good. Where?’
‘With the Tadworth Players.’
I’m sure I saw her ears unprick, nevertheless she decided to press on and asked me to read a few pages of the part of Geppetto, the old carpenter in Pinocchio, which I did my best to deliver in an old man’s voice.
Then I had to be a fire-eater – a theatrical circus performer with lots of arm flourish and raised eyebrows. She was beginning to look more interested, and asked me to show her how I thought an owl might speak.
Interspersing long, lugubrious words with a few Tu-whoos and Tu-whits, I felt I acquitted myself all right. More encouraged now, she laughed and asked me if I could drive. I didn’t realise then, but this was an important qualification for the job. So, too, was my lack of an actor’s Equity card – although she made nothing of it at the time.
‘When can you start?’ she asked.
I yammered incoherently for a moment or two, not certain that I’d heard right.
‘Could you start next week?’ she pressed.
‘Yes, of course!’ I gasped at last.
I set off on the return drive to Epsom in a state of majestic euphoria, feeling that my first unlikely attempt to find a future for myself, which I’d considered a very long shot, had paid off spectacularly. A short way into the journey home a heavy snowstorm got up, but I carried on, singing my head off, thrilled to have succeeded at something I’d done on my own initiative, and astonished at how easy it had been to get the job when everyone had told me it was impossible.
I had to wait impatiently before my parents arrived back from their holiday a few days later. I had terminated the grocery job and was all ready to go. I told them the good news – to my father’s gritted teeth disgust – and announced that I was taking the train to Birkenhead in the morning.
I felt like Dick Whittington, with a sandwich, a toothbrush and a spare pair of pants wrapped in a red spotted hanky as I set off next morning, to arrive shortly after lunch, as requested, at Birkenhead’s Argyle Theatre.
My new place of work was still more or less a bombed-out wreck, except for one end which was occupied by the Argyle Theatre for Youth. This company sent out tours of basic stage productions to put on in schools all over the country. I knew I was going to love the job, and was very happy at the idea of being paid for doing what I most enjoyed – fooling around with mimicry and voices, recreating and caricaturing the characters I’d observed and retained over the years.
From the very first run-through, I was in no doubt that this was what I’d always wanted to do, and I would be happy to go on doing for as long as I could move.
And fifty years on, I haven’t changed my mind.
The Young Actor - The 196os
The Argyle Theatre for Youth had been set up to tour the country, putting on simple productions of plays in schools. Whether this was done with a view to educating the kids or simply shutting them up so the teachers could get a bit of a rest for an hour or two, I never really gathered. I suppose it was a commercial enterprise, but being of a naive and unworldly frame of mind at the time, I never enquired. The schedule of performances was frantic, but for a nineteen year old with itchy feet and a fanciful nature, it was a great way to live.
After just a week’s preparation and rehearsal for a production of Pinocchio, we set off in the company’s Commer van. There were five of us, three girls, and another man – a gloomy middle-aged Scot – packed into the aging vehicle, along with a collapsible ‘fit-up’ Dexion stage, complete with proscenium arch, curtains and drawstrings, a few lighting boxes and a couple of costume hampers. When I found that I was expected to do most of the driving, it dawned on me that if I hadn’t been able to drive, I wouldn’t have got the job; and a few weeks in, once I’d begun to appreciate that I was doing up to twenty four shows a week for a wage of £11, I understood that my lack of an Equity card had also been strongly in my favour. I must have been getting less than half the minimum for that number of performances. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the travelling, and got to see a whole lot of Britain – albeit in a perfunctory way – in a short space of time. As a child, I hadn’t travelled much beyond a few holidays with my parents in touristic destinations – the Peak District, the Isle of Wight and the River Wye at Symonds Yat; now I was staying in a different town every night for three months on the trot.
We would drive from school to school, book into digs, and sometimes do two or three shows a day at different schools in the town. We became very adept at leaping out of the van as soon as we’d arrived, putting up the stage in a matter of minutes, and adapting it, too, for a separate glove puppet show – in which I found a good use for my owl impressions.
I was loving it, and the only thing that spoilt my first tour was our Scottish colleague, a man of such angry pessimism and dark humour that it was almost impossible to coexist with him.
Glasgow was an eye-opener. Although now it’s more or less commonplace to see inebriated young women in scanty frocks stumbling around our provincial capitals with their knickers around their ankles, in 1962 I’d never seen so much overt drunkenness as I saw in Glasgow. I noticed, too, that a lot of the boarding houses had signs outside saying, ‘Sorry, no Theatricals please’. I guessed that previous visiting ‘theatricals’ must have behaved very badly indeed to provoke a ban like that. And the plain-speaking landladies, in the digs that would have us, came as a shock.
‘D’ye like kippers?’ one asked me.
‘No,’ I answered emphatically, remembering the hideous foul-smelling slabs of salty orange shoe leather that had been served up under that name at school breakfasts.
‘Weell, you’d better start likin’ ’em, ’cos that’s all ye’re getting for breakfast’ – which taught me, at least, how delicious a good kipper could be.
When I’d started the tour, I was a nineteen-year-old virgin, not out of choice, but because in 1962 the so-called sexual revolution hadn’t happened. As Philip Larkin succinctly put it...
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP...
Without going into any moral analysis of this, I was damned sure I didn’t want to be a twenty-year-old virgin. But it seemed the women in our troupe – two of my age, and an ‘older’ woman (perhaps in her early thirties) – could somehow smell my lack of carnal knowledge, and to begin with I made very little headway in advancing it. I wasn’t helped by my male colleague, who seemed to get an evil buzz from constantly ragging me. He was a man of sociopathic tendencies whose idea of fun was to see his fellow men looking as uncomfortable as possible, and he would regularly set up practical jokes and ambushes to catch people off their guard, especially me.
One night, early in the tour, he insisted that he should play my part of Geppetto, while I took on his, the main part of the Wicked Fox. During the performance, he kept coming in from the wrong side, to unnerve me, and throw me off my lines, and he would stand there, deliberately not giving me my cues. This was typical behaviour, designed to make his fellow players as uncomfortable and on edge as possible. I never did understand why he was particularly nasty to me, although I’ve since thought maybe he was trying to compensate for his homosexuality, which was still illegal to practise in those days, and often uncomfortably concealed.
In general, though, I was enjoying the experience, relishing my independence, and pleased, frankly, to be away from my father’s increasingly black moods and harsh criticism. I was especially conscious that this colossal change in my life had happened through my initiative, and no one else’s, and I felt very much that now I was ploughing my own furrow. When the Pinocchio tour was over I had little hesitation in signing up for another one, on the strict condition, which was granted, that I wouldn’t be touring with my Scottish antagonist again. This time we were to do a play called The Emperor’s Nightingale – a children’s play based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, packed with songs and humour. It was a tale of dragons and tigers, of sacred mountains and stolen treasure, and a little bird who manages to win the heart of the young Chinese Emperor.
The children made great audiences, although they would often chatter and heckle the whole way through, like a Shakespearean audience. Sometimes participation could be so enthusiastic as to be inconvenient, like the time I thought I’d collided with a piece of furniture, only to find a child hiding in the Emperor’s robes I was wearing.
During the course of this happy tour, we found ourselves in the south of England, indeed, in the southern suburbs of London, not far from the place where I’d auditioned for the job. I could have gone and stayed at home, but I didn’t choose to, which allowed another unexpected and long-awaited event to occur. Frances, the ‘older’ woman in the company, suggested I come with her to the hotel where she was staying. There, with my full cooperation, she proceeded to seduce me and give me, at last, my first sexual experience: the Full, as it were, Monty.
