Much has already been made in our book about letters that are written home when an actor is away on tour, but what of those that are written to the actor from the homestead? The aforementioned subject of financial woes was prevalent in our early days as a married couple but over the years we have reported on hundreds of subjects including (having recently had a good look through some of the letters) pets, gardens, self-confidence, daytime television, school reports, calcium deficiency, adagio dances and even fascists. Whatever’s happening in our worlds, basically. Where to begin then? I think fascists is as good a start as any.
This is one of my favourite letters from Pru and there are many to choose from. It was written in 1965 while she was at home making Marriage Lines and I was away on tour in something or another.
18th April 1965
Darling Love,
Do hope you didn’t ring last night and think I was being unfaithful, I was next door having dinner with Martin, Willow and THREE FASCISTS. Father, wife and 25(?)-year-old son, fat with beard, dark suit, gold-rimmed glasses and beautiful French! I played it very intelligent and upper class and the father fell flat and tried to recruit me. ‘Our movement has sent representatives to seventeen university debating societies in the last two years and won every time.’ I got awfully drunk and said it was disgraceful and he LOVED it … ‘You speak French, my dear, I thought so, I could tell you were a highly civilised woman, just the sort we want in the movement.’ Gosh, it was funny. Change a word here and there and they might have been Moral Reasoners. I do think rich upper-class movements are the most frightening of all. Both father and son were wearing navy blue white-spotted ties by COINCIDENCE. The father was a hard rider, and I was sorely tempted to say that I was anti bloody sports as well, but I was afraid he might have an orgasm at the table. Ho, ho. WISH you had been there. Martin and Willow behaved beautifully throughout, I believe they’re friends of the sort of people Martin is working for in Spain. Really stinking rich, so rich the wife’s hair looked as if she’d just got out of bed.
Great Love,
Your Pruey xx
I arrived home roughly two weeks later and although we hadn’t seen each other for well over two months that was the first thing we talked about.
‘Tell me more about these fascists you encountered,’ I asked hungrily.
‘Oh, darling, they were awful! The son was completely repugnant. I do wish you’d been there.’
I can’t recall a time when either of us was out of work for more than a few days during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even so, money remained scarce after we bought the house in Wandsworth and, due to her being rather good at it, Pru did the majority of the worrying. In addition to repairs to the house and everyday living expenses we were paying £5 a week towards her parents’ rent, and we were paying almost £10 a week for the nanny. It did get to a point in 1970 when we thought that we might have to sell the car, which would have had a material effect on our earning power, not to mention our domestic life. The following letter is the earliest I can find from Pru after moving in.
Darling
Herewith gas bill, which though not as much as you thought, is still pretty staggering: I promise the next one won’t be as bad. I’ve got everything off most of the time now, and this covers the installation time when it was roaring away full blast each day. BUT, I’m afraid I can’t pay it, nor Harvey’s, which I also enclose. They have agreed to allow us £21 for the decoration etc, so it’s only £71:17:0. I will send them Alf’s statements when I get them.
Don’t know what we’re going to do for money. Have heard nothing about Tetley’s. Still, we’re luckier than most. Bob and Patti have not been out for MONTHS. Both working again now. Bob dropped in this morning.
URGENT: did you complete that form about the rates? We’ll go to prison or something if it’s not in before 21 days.
Much love,
Pruey xx
Like Pru, I did worry about our situation, although not nearly as much as she did. This began to change, however, when in the early 1970s Pru claimed to feel like a failure in one of her letters.
Would welcome suggestions on how to cut down. Shall stay in digs in Cheltenham, not buy any more plants for the garden, etc. etc., but short of sacking the au pair and selling the children I don’t know what else I can do. I feel a frightful failure … very depressed about it all. It seems so easy to get into debt, and so cripplingly hard to climb out of it.
This letter had a profound effect on me and although I continued writing to Pru as often as I could, I also began telephoning her regularly.
‘Look, darling,’ I said after reading the letter. ‘This financial thing is just temporary, you have to believe that. It’s more to do with cashflow than anything else. We just need to get paid a bit quicker, that’s all. If it hadn’t been for your efforts in economising, by the way, we’d have been in the workhouse. Failure, my foot!’
Although my words had an effect of sorts, they were fortified by way of some timely well-paid work – namely, a television advert. Pru had already made several of these, most notably for Tetley Tea a year or two before Marriage Lines first started and it had paid handsomely.
‘Tetley Tea want me for a second time,’ she said excitedly, after putting down the phone.
‘Oh, that’s a relief. We’ll be able to pay some bills now.’
The company had enquired about Pru some three months previously and knowing full well that the money would put us back on an even keel again had made the wait almost unbearable. Not just for Pru, but for both of us.
The first advert Pru made for Tetley Tea was basically a thirty-second infomercial telling the great British public how to make tea using tea bags. It sounds rather ridiculous now, but back then teabags were a new thing and, regardless of their convenience, the general public were mistrusting of them. Pru and me actually watched the advert a few days ago and her performance is a real tour de force. ‘Hello, I’m just making a cup of tea,’ she says. ‘And I’m using Tetley Tea bags. Look, here’s what you do. You put one tea bag per person into a nice warm pot,’ etc. etc. etc.
‘Good lord, how long ago was that?’ Pru asked me.
‘I’m not telling you,’ I replied. ‘It’ll make you sick.’
‘As long ago as that then? Oh dear.’
As part of her deal for the advert in 1970, which we haven’t seen since, Pru was given what was supposed to be a year’s supply of tea. This was an added extra, by the way. Had they tried to swap cash for tea bags they’d have received short shrift. The tea bags arrived in a very large box and, because I was at home alone at the time, I decided to open it. Inside were lots of smaller boxes and after finding the individual tea bags I proceeded to hide them all over the house, or wherever Pru might venture – drawers, wardrobes, cupboards and so on. I even hid them in her clothes. It was 1974 by the time she found them all.
‘Are you sure there aren’t any more?’ she asked me.
‘Fairly,’ I confessed.
Pru remained in demand with advertising companies until fairly recently, whereas my own career in commercials never really took off. The most memorable one I ever made was for Pilkington Glass in 1987. One or two readers might even remember it. Literally, one or two. While I stand in a studio extolling the many virtues of Pilkington Glass a marksman prepares to fire a gun at my head and when he finally pulls the trigger my life is saved by what else but a large pane of Pilkington bulletproof glass. Instantly forgettable, but the money was great.
Ten years earlier, I’d really thought I’d made it in the advertising world when I was asked by Cadbury, no less, to play Henry VIII in an advert for a new product called Cadbury’s Plain Six. It was part of a series of commercials directed by Richard Lester featuring Shakespearean characters such as Hamlet, Henry VIII and Richard III, extolling the virtues of this exciting new confection.
As Bluff King Hal, I was to be discovered lying on a couch beside a comely wench and, after growing tired of her charms, would reach beneath a cushion and retrieve a Cadbury’s Plain Six. It was quite a funny idea, I thought, and after the first morning’s rehearsal Richard Lester informed me that he was happy with the progress we had made thus far.
Less happy was the worried-looking gentleman in the canvas chair with ‘Client’ written on the back of it. He asked if he could have a word with me, so I pulled up my own canvas chair and invited him to go ahead. ‘Look, he said, before drawing a long breath. ‘What we’re trying to sell here is plain chocolate. Right?’
I agreed.
‘In fact, this is a plain chocolate campaign, right?’
‘Right,’ I said with less certainty.
‘What you are doing would be fine if we were selling milk chocolate. Do you see what I mean?’
Try as I might, my brain would not play ball. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘At the end of the war,’ he began, ‘when chocolate reappeared in the shops, it was almost all milk chocolate, which is easier to produce. Our parents bought us milk chocolate, and we in turn passed on the habit.’ He was already losing me. ‘Consequently, the only indigenous plain chocolate consumers tend now to be in their seventies, and it’s our business to try to enlarge the market.’ He then looked at me intently. ‘Look at the After Eight adverts,’ he said. ‘Dinner parties, black tie, expensive dresses, candelabra. Silver! That’s the impression we’re trying to create. The world of plain chocolate is something to aspire to.’
‘You mean –’ I said cannily – ‘you want a soft sell?’ I forget where I’d heard the phrase, but it was in context and impressed him greatly.
‘Exactly,’ he beamed. ‘Do you think you can help?’
‘I will do my best,’ I said solemnly. ‘You have my word.’
When it came to shooting the advert, I merely lowered my voice slightly, but the client seemed delighted. ‘That’s it,’ he said, after Richard had shouted ‘cut’.
The product flopped, of course, and I was later told by a marketing expert that the number six had been its downfall. ‘If the buyer wants to share it with someone, how do they break it? With eight pieces, or twelve, or sixteen, it’s easy. Not with six. You have to end up with an even number each.’ I didn’t quite see what he was getting at but it was better than blaming the advertising.
I obviously can’t prove it but I think Pru must have been one of the first people in history to report on outsized knitted sweaters, calcium deficiency, a macabre adagio dance, insubordination, tax and lettuces in the same letter. It was written in August 1970.
Darling Love,
Here, at last is your sweater. Sorry it’s so long and wide.
Boys are well, Sam does a macabre adagio dance ending up under the bed, very impressive, and Joseph eats a good deal of eggshells, like an old hen, I suppose it’s calcium deficiency.
Yesterday I asked Sam to get me something and he said, ‘Fetch it yourself, I’m doing this.’ So I protested sharply and he said, ‘Mummy, could you possibly manage it yourself because I’m rather busy at the moment.’
Do you think you could possibly start saving a fiver a week towards tax? It should be ten really, but I know your running costs are high. We still owe £262, and you are, at the moment, earning more than I am, and it looks as if that’s going to go on for a bit.
The potatoes have succeeded triumphantly, and we should have some lettuces soon, so the garden isn’t all that of a self-indulgence.
All my love,
Pruey xx
One thing we have never been in short supply of since moving to Wandsworth is pets, which is the subject of perhaps my second favourite letter from Pru. These days we have one cat, Hannah, who you might say is at the top of the food chain. In the 1970s, however, it was sometimes like a menagerie.
Before meeting Pru, I had always been a dog person, whereas she had always preferred the company of cats. Soon after getting married, Pru informed me that she intended to bring home a cat and at first I was in two minds. After all, I had married Pru, not Pru plus feline companion. I eventually gave her my blessing and so she acquired one – a ginger cat she called Lion – from a farm belonging to some friends of my parents.
‘Why did you name him Lion?’ I asked her one day.
‘Watch this,’ said Pru.
‘LION!’ she shouted. ‘COME HERE, LION!’ A few seconds later the small and very un-lion-like cat trotted into the room looking a bit bemused. ‘There,’ said Pru smiling. ‘Isn’t that fun?’
At first I was indifferent to Lion’s presence and just ignored him. He was Pru’s cat, not mine. Then, while we were staying at the cottage that we had rented just outside Stratford while I was appearing with the RSC and Pru was working in Birmingham, Lion, who hadn’t taken to Warwickshire at all and clearly missed Barnes, started acting strangely. He seemed to adapt very poorly to touring and we were nervous that he would try to walk back to London. One morning I was in the bath and Pru was at the wash basin and a towel suddenly slipped off the rail behind my head and into the water. I immediately leapt out of the bath and shouted, ‘Christ!’
‘What on earth’s the matter?’ asked Pru.
‘Oh, thank God,’ I said. ‘I thought it was the kitten committing suicide.’
That, according to Pru, was confirmation that I had become a cat convert.
A few years later after Lion had passed away, we got two Burmese cats. One was already called Lilly and nominations to name the second cat came in thick and fast. Sam, who was a big cricket fan, wanted to call him Thomson, as in Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson.
‘I don’t like cricket,’ said Pru. ‘How about Skinner, as in Lilley & Skinner?’
‘I am very much against cruelty to animals,’ I interjected, ‘and if you decide to name these two cats after a shoe shop, I will inform the RSPCA.’
‘How about Gish?’ said Joe. ‘Mummy loves Lillian Gish.’
‘Lilly and Gish. Mmm, maybe,’ said Pru.
At the time of the cat’s arrival, I was working at the Old Vic Theatre, so I suggested the theatre’s one-time licensee, Lilian Baylis. ‘That’s the one,’ said Pru. ‘Lilly and Baylis it is. It’s the perfect pun.’
Lilly and Baylis became the cats of Sam and Joe’s childhood and fortunately they have many memories of them, as do we. Sam thinks that his mother has always been a little bit cat-like, but especially these days. Because of her condition, she’ll quietly enter a room without purpose and without knowing quite why she’s there. When I meet people in the street the first thing they ask me is, ‘How’s Pru?’ and I always say that, actually, she’s quite jolly. We’ll come onto that later, though.
Lilly and Baylis used to sleep on the wooden radiator covers in the living room and the boys worked out that if you stroked Baylis between his back and his shoulders, and not too hard, he would arch his hind legs and then push them up. Positioned correctly, he would push the picture above him off the wall. Sam and Joe used to find this most amusing. Pru and me, less so.
Anyway, on to this letter from Pru. In addition to cats, reptiles and, later, rats, we also kept a variety of fish in the house. The demise of one such gill-bearing aquatic animal caused a great deal of worry for Pru, not surprisingly, and robbed me of a trusted friend and confidant.
Darling Love,
I’m sorry to say, – Hector the goldfish has died entirely through my fault: I finally got around to cleaning and moving the tank, cleaning the gravel etc., yesterday, and I put Hector and Silver in a bowl while I was doing it and Hector jumped out while I was out of the room and was dead when Sam and Kelly [the nanny] found him. They’ve gone to get another one this morning although Sam was very upset at first I’m afraid he and Joseph now discuss it with extreme enthusiasm and cheerfulness. The tank I must say is better in the dining room and I’ve fixed the light so I hope Silver will adjust to new chum but I’m most terribly sorry for being so careless.
Took Kelly to see Sunday Bloody Sunday last night. Very enjoyable. She’s doing quite well now, I’ve got her L-plates and she should really pass next time.
Sam in cap and blazer is deeply moving and obvious Scoutmaster fodder I’m afraid. School seems to be going OK.
Sorry!
All my love
Pru xx
On receiving Pru’s letter I sank into a mini-depression. I can’t tell you how or why it started, but before his pal Silver arrived on the scene (or should I say, in the tank) I was alone with Hector in the conservatory one day and I just started talking to him. He seemed like quite an amiable sort of chap and was always interested in what I had to say and so it became a regular thing. Some people talk to plants, so why not a goldfish?
‘How could you, Pru?’ I said after deciding to call her on the telephone. ‘My one true friend and confidant, gone forever.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, darling,’ she said feigning contrition. ‘Would it help if we named the new one Hector?’
‘I suppose it might soften the blow a bit,’ I said gloomily.
I still miss him.