Slipstream (12 page)

The political situation darkened throughout August as it had the previous summer, but I no longer had the dread that I’d experienced then. After all, Mr Chamberlain had gone to see Hitler
and resolved everything, and so, in as much as I thought about it at all, I assumed the same thing would happen again. News was nothing like so ubiquitous then: we were, perhaps, unusual in that we
didn’t possess a wireless. I’m sure my parents took a newspaper, but it was strictly for them. So news was confined to the occasional guarded remark made at the dinner table. However,
by the end of August it was clear that the possibility of war had escalated to likelihood. My grandfather decreed that my aunt Ruth’s Babies’ Hotel – a charity she ran that housed
unwanted babies and trained student nurses to become nannies – should be evacuated to the estate. The Barn was to house the babies, and the student nurses were to sleep in the squash court.
All this was rather exciting. A wireless was procured.

I remember Chamberlain’s announcement, made at eleven o’clock on the morning of 3 September, because at the end of it and in the silence that followed my
grandfather got to his feet and kissed all three of his sons, which I don’t think had ever happened before. He then decreed that we were all – and this included small people with wooden
spades – to set about digging ourselves an air-raid shelter. About half an hour later, the first air-raid warning sounded, and then I felt awful fear: my visions of bombers flattening London
in one terrible raid returned. My cat, Bill, was in London, and I knew that cats weren’t going to be issued with gas masks. Minutes later, the all-clear sounded, but that was only temporarily
reassuring. Then there was a lull, which continued, from the civilian point of view, for many months.

I went back to Seer Green, but Carol didn’t come with me: her parents wanted her to qualify for some war work. The family returned to London. My father volunteered to join the Navy, and
when they turned him down, the Air Force; he was given the job of protecting Hendon aerodrome. My uncle John joined the Army. Geof was left with the Brig to run the family firm: timber was in great
demand and the continuance of the firm was regarded as essential to the war effort. Shelters were dug in the parks in London, and built all over the city. Gas masks were issued: they came in
cardboard boxes with a strap to hang them over your shoulder, and we were enjoined never to be without them. A huge Expeditionary Force was sent to France, and everybody said the Germans would
never penetrate or get past the Maginot Line. Children were evacuated from cities, and some were sent to America. My aunt Helen went with her three younger children on a boat to New York, took them
to relatives and then discovered that if she was to return to England she must take the next ship. She had to leave without saying goodbye to her children with whom she’d hoped to spend a
week settling them in.

At Seer Green, school continued as before. I did an extra term to help get over homesickness. Rationing didn’t start until December,
so that was the last term when we
were still being taught to deal with recipes that began, ‘Take a dozen eggs and two pints of cream’.

I’d become more religious. Miss Laidler, with whom I went to church every Sunday, suggested I might like to meet a woman called Jessie and wheel her to church. Jessie had been a housemaid
whose employer had put her into a damp bed whereupon she contracted rheumatoid arthritis so badly that she couldn’t walk. I first met her in the small house where she lived with her family.
She was sitting in her chair, with her poor twisted, useless fingers lying on the plaid rug that was wrapped about her knees. She was very pale, and had fuzzy brown hair and beautiful glowing eyes.
Religion was her life.

I used to take her to church every Sunday. I knew I could never match her faith and goodness, but I desperately wanted to be a better person. Father Dix had volunteered to be an Army chaplain,
and his brother, Father Gregory, a Dominican monk, had taken his place. I learned it was possible to go to Confession, and went. Even my sins, and I tried extremely hard to be honest about them,
seemed trivial and I felt they were probably a waste of Father Gregory’s time, but I struggled on, painting myself as black as I could. Jessie talked a great deal about Jesus Christ and the
glorious life that would come to her after death, and I could believe it for her, but not for myself. I was too selfish: my desire to be an actress hadn’t waned and I couldn’t renounce
it in favour of some more worthy, less selfish pursuit.

During that winter the war seemed so distant that to me my future was an entirely personal matter, and the idea of becoming a saint, or at least a nun, was far beyond my nature: both professions
seemed to involve giving up everything I knew of ordinary life. Life at school was nothing more than an interim step: I knew that beyond it lay dazzling possibilities as yet unknown, but all the
more alluring for that. I’d gradually overcome my homesickness and no longer lay tearfully on my bed, and had almost stopped breaking pudding basins from a distracted longing for home. By the
time
I finished at acting school I’d be able to go anywhere without a qualm.

But, meanwhile, the question of goodness preoccupied me. I didn’t have Jessie’s faith which seemed to transcend her cramped and, to me, indescribably dreary life. All I could do for
her was to take her to church each Sunday and stay and talk to her until Miss Laidler came to fetch me. She’d once been to stay in London, at a Christian hostel run, she said, by a wonderful
lady of almost saintly stature. This short visit was the highlight of her life and she never tired of talking about it.

This was the first time the classic controversy of injustice and God’s power to change it struck me. I prayed for her recovery every night, but it made no difference. I couldn’t
– like so many others before and after me – equate His mercy with His apparent indifference to Jessie’s fate, and the arguments against this notion were too sophisticated for my
honest belief in them.

Looking back, I am astonished at how undisturbed I was by my colossal ignorance about almost everything. It’s laughable to realize now that the only point on which I was utterly sanguine
was my future as an actress. I was going to be famous: I’d play any Shakespearean part I pleased – it would all come to me, although I’d no idea how.

In London Dosia had left the Royal College of Music to return home and help her mother with the evacuees who’d descended upon them. I missed her, but we wrote to each other. Christmas was
spent at the Beacon. I spent the mornings at the Barn, learning how to bath and feed the babies there. My favourite was an eight-month-old Indian, an imperious little girl called Mira. I adored
her. There was also a very small – he can’t have been more than a few weeks old – baby boy called Billy. I loved him too, largely because everyone kept saying how ugly he was. He
was, indeed, a strange sight, bright yellow, with a careworn, wizened face and a shock of long spiky dark hair that looked like a silly wig. I’d cuddle him and privately lie to him about how
lovely he was to cheer him up
and was sometimes rewarded by a ghastly, fleeting little smile followed by a look of shock – as though he’d surprised himself by being
pleased about anything.

In the spring term at school – I’d stayed on, because I’d been such a slow learner – there was an outbreak of measles. Those of us who succumbed, and I was one, were
moved to a smaller house where we were nursed. We lay in dark rooms feeling awful, and all our letters to home were baked in an oven to prevent further infection. The worst thing was being
forbidden to read.

Food rationing had begun, but hadn’t yet achieved the full rigour that was to come. Sometime the previous autumn Myra Hess had written to my father, of whom she was extremely fond, asking
him teasingly for some ‘anti-Semitic’ wood for the platform for the lunchtime National Gallery concerts that she was to organize. In the holidays, I used to go to some of them: Nina
Milkina performed, and Denis Matthews, and the Griller String Quartet, and Myra herself, sometimes with Irene Scharrer, playing two pianos. It was at one of these concerts that my mother met
Kathleen Kennet whom she’d known, though not well, since the First World War when she’d danced in Kathleen’s studio. Kathleen was accompanied by her second son, Wayland, who was
nearly the same age as I. ‘You must send Jane to Fritton in the Easter holidays to come and play with Wayland.’ I remember that Wayland and I looked at each other warily: the idea that
we ‘played’ was below our sixteen-year-old dignity, and would we like each other? Horrified at the thought of staying with people whom I didn’t know, I hoped that this notion
would die a natural death, but it didn’t. My mother got a letter from Lady Kennet a few days later confirming the invitation and my mother said I must go. I consented with the proviso that my
brother Robin should accompany me: this was agreed by all, and there was no way out.

I left Seer Green at the end of the spring term. I’d made no contemporary friends there, but had become fond of some of the staff and felt bad about leaving Jessie, although Miss Laidler
promised that someone else would take over wheeling her to church.

I was chiefly preoccupied with my impending audition with the London Mask Theatre School, which was run by John Fernald: J. B. Priestley, Ronald Jeans and Michael MacOwan were also directors. If
I was accepted as a student, my parents had agreed I might go. The school was a studio in Ebury Street and also had some use of the Westminster Theatre, where several of Priestley’s plays
were performed.

There were a number of us waiting to audition, but I don’t remember feeling in the least nervous. We had been told to prepare two pieces, one of which should be a speech from Shakespeare.
The auditions took place in a small room off the main studio where Fernald and someone I no longer remember sat behind a large desk.

My name was checked and I plunged in. I did Juliet’s ‘The clock struck nine when I did send my nurse . . .’ speech, followed by an improvisation of a genteel lady conducting a
children’s dancing class.

I was accepted. I was tremendously excited at the prospect of starting on my career at last, but I don’t remember that I was surprised. My confidence in this area was as extreme –
even arrogant – as it was lacking in almost every other context. I knew I could act, and I knew I could make people laugh.

Otherwise, I was a mass of anxiety. My appearance dismayed me. I’d grown so much and so quickly and it had been much remarked upon that I walked about with hunched shoulders and my head
stuck forward. I had long, stick-like arms, and what my mother described as ‘English legs’: knees like root vegetables and no ankles to speak of. My hair was straight – not
fashionable then – and ‘perms’ simply made it frizzy. I had a low forehead with a widow’s peak – off centre, of course – and my nose was far too large for the
rest of my face. I remember looking in the glass with the sombre thought that I was far too plain for anyone to want to
marry me, so it was a good thing I had a career – or
was going to have one. I was also beginning to realize how uneducated I was. I wasn’t even much good at games or sport of any kind. I was still clumsy and, having thought I had overcome
homesickness, was assailed by fears of the coming visit to Norfolk with the Kennets.

Before I went there, my father took my mother, Robin and me for two weeks on the Norfolk Broads. All I can remember about that was that I invented a character called Violet who kept worrying
about people falling into the water, and that my St Swithin’s prayer book fell irretrievably into the bilges.

My parents dropped us at Fritton Hythe, which the Kennets had leased for the duration of the war. It was a long, low bungalow looking on to Fritton Lake and surrounded by woods. It was carpeted
in colours of fuchsia and gentian blue and consisted of one long passage with rooms off it, all except the kitchen and one bedroom facing the lake. We were taken to the drawing room at the far end
where the family were about to have tea. Lady Kennet sat on a sofa by the fireplace embroidering with wool, and Wayland was playing the piano. By the window a stocky man in a roll-necked jersey was
painting at an easel. K, as I soon discovered the family called her, introduced us: ‘Jane and Robin Howard, you’ve met Wayland, and here is my older son, Peter, who is on sick leave.
And here is Bill,’ as he came into the room. Lord Kennet was white-haired and balding and his right arm was missing. I just managed to hold out my left hand to shake his. He was K’s
second husband. Tea appeared with chocolate cake: conversation rioted – jokes, literary allusions, teasing, political figures and artists referred to by their Christian names. Robin and I
weren’t left out – indeed we were skilfully drawn in; it was somehow made implicit that this was also our life. This was achieved through charm: the whole family were charming
collectively, and it took a few days to sort out the variety of it peculiar to each one. As we felt more at ease Robin and I were able, in our different ways, to join in. We were encouraged to sing
for our supper, and were appreciated for our
slightest efforts to do so. We played duets with Wayland, and I did some of my sketches. K loved the young: she adored her sons, and
her relationship with Bill held none of the dark, disparate undertones I’d experienced at home.

We spent about ten days at Fritton. On Sunday, I wanted to go to church – clearly not the practice of the Kennet family, but neither was it a practice of my family. I was told that there
was a church at the far end of the lake and that Robin and I could sail there in one of the little Norwegian prams that they kept for lake sailing. This we did, and quarrelled on the way back as
people so often do in boats.

The second day we were there, Peter asked if he might draw me. I was entranced. Draw me? Half of me wanted to say, ‘Why on earth
me
?’ and the other half was too nervous of his
possible second thoughts. To sit for a painter was better even than being asked to turn pages of music for a pianist: it was being a kind of associate member of the arts, and I could think of
nothing more desirable than that.