Our house was at one end of a terrace, and halfway down sat the Paris Pullman, a stylish and intimate little cinema where foreign and classic films of a heavier-than-average weight were shown. If your tastes leant towards the popular, you only had to cross the street, walk a few yards and there was the Fulham Forum, a fat and comfortable flea-pit, where many a rainy afternoon was spent enjoying the B movie before the main feature reeled its way into my consciousness. For a film fan, two cinemas in one street was luxury beyond belief; I could see everything I wanted, classic and contemporary, foreign and Hollywood, appalling and inspirational. One Easter holiday I went to the Paris Pullman to see East of Eden for the first time. I was so moved by James Dean’s performance that I went to see it over and over again that holiday. I silently mouthed every syllable that Jo Van Fleet, Raymond Massey, Julie Harris, James Dean, Richard Davalos and Burl Ives uttered, and was horrified by Raymond Massey’s insensitive treatment of his son, Cal. Never has a film so accurately exposed the pain of a child rejected by a parent, and the lengths that child will go to win a parent’s love. James Dean’s portrayal was flawless, and it didn’t matter how many times I saw the film, I still ached with the injustice of it all.
Later, Sebastian took me to see Les Enfants du Paradis, and this time I left the Paris Pullman overwhelmed and in love. My previous crush had been harder to understand. Mike Winters, the marginally more handsome brother of Bernie, had given me many a sleepless night, and when I switched my affections to Jean Louis Barrault, although puzzled by my own eclecticism, I recognised this as a turning point to a more discerning change of heart. I loved his ethereal and idiosyncratic quality, and if we’d been the same age when the film came out, I would have swum the English Channel and made him mine. Instead, I wrote him a letter and sent it to the Comédie Française. A month later a special delivery postman handed me a single pink rose with a letter attached. The letter, carried around with me in every pocket of every coat and eventually lost when it fell out on the water slide at Battersea funfair, told of his joy on receiving my letter, of his wish I consider myself his ‘Little Arletty’ in London, of his hope my life was a full and happy one. It was a generous and perceptive letter and I treasured it, along with his rose, which stood for a while in a vase of constantly replenished water until the petals had all fallen off and the lonely stalk didn’t seem worth saving. He invited me to visit him at the Comédie Française. I never went.
Back at school the tedious days rolled on, one ordinary day the same as the next. We went ‘down the field’ and lay on the grass with our blue-and-white striped summer dresses tucked tightly between our legs – ‘There are workmen here, girls, cover yourselves up’ – and talked for hours about the boys ‘out there’ who would be our husbands. We all vowed to be virgins when we married, and I think one of us was. One night someone sneaked some cigarettes into the dormitory and we all piled into my cubicle, like Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. But lacking the essential member of the opposite sex, all we could do was draw deeply on our individual cigarette, perfect our inhalation skills and elegantly throw our wrists back à la Bette Davis. We were just discussing the boys out there and ‘how far’ we would go with them when one of the nuns pulled my curtain open with such force that it tore off its rings. ‘As from tomorrow you are suspended,’ she screamed, ‘but first you will have a meeting with Sister Superior, and finally you’ll be sent home, where you will have your parents to deal with.’
Sister Superior looked me up and down with her pince-nez perched on the tip of her absurdly hooked nose. ‘Clare Peake,’ she said, as if I were a clod of muck she’d spotted on the sole of her shiny, wrinkled shoe. ‘You are C.O.M.M.O.N – VULGAR!’ It seemed such a curious thing to say. I expected to be punished, I deserved it, but I’d never thought of myself as common or vulgar, and the spelling of ‘common’ letter by letter struck me as very odd. But ‘Clare Peake you are c.o.m.m.o.n. – vulgar’ became one of those delicious family in-jokes, treasured forever, and rolled out every time I did anything wrong.
I met my mother under the clock at Victoria Station, where we both went along with her stab at stunned outrage for a fraction of a second, then got down to the real business of enjoying the next seven days of our lovely unplanned week together. We saw The Miracle Worker and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, we strolled to Kensington Gardens to visit Peter Pan for the millionth time, we went to the Tate to be thrilled yet again by the Picassos, and we went to buy a bra. As my bosom had begun to grow into something resembling the real thing, it was time to take it seriously, so off we trotted to Peter Jones so I could be fitted for a first bra by one of their formidable lady measurers. With the tape wound around her neck, and my shivering bosom hoping to make a good impression, we finally settled for the ‘Dawn Bra’ – ‘A lovely snug fit, young lady’. We then looked for grown-up clothes to complement my new shape.
This was a never-to-be-forgotten day, spent trying on whole outfits from the inside out – not children’s clothes but thrilling, earth-shattering ensembles. First there was an up-to-the-minute polo-neck jumper, and through the thin black wool, my twin bosoms were so high and pointed they could easily have poked a small man’s eyes out. Then an orange corduroy shift dress, black stockings and suspender belt, patent leather shoes with a kitten heel and, finally and most thrilling of all, my first bottle of perfume – Chanel No. 5. What else? The scent Marilyn wore. I’d never been spoilt, so this experience was too wonderful for words. As I stood staring at myself in the full-length mirror, I felt ready to face the world with shy equanimity. Just one more thing was needed to make my transformation complete. After enormous deliberation, I had my dead straight, waist-length hair cut into a tight just-below-the-ears perm and, in one fell swoop, I went from modern teenage girl to middle-aged accounts manager.
There was a reason for my new look. I was being taken to see Two Stars for Comfort, the new John Mortimer play at the Garrick. Maeve’s great friend, Esmond Knight, was in it, and we were going backstage to say hello to him, and for me to be introduced to Trevor Howard, the star of the production. I’d seen Brief Encounter on television one Sunday afternoon and, of course, knew exactly who he was. Was he primed? I didn’t think so at the time, but as we entered his dressing room he gasped, ‘Oh hello, you gorgeous girl. How wonderful to meet you. Now how old did your mother say you were. No, don’t tell me, you must be fifteen or is it sixteen?’ ‘I’m thirteen,’ I whispered, my new bosom heaving like a real woman’s. ‘Well, I simply can’t believe it,’ he said. I looked at Maeve who nodded in agreement. ‘Do you think I might take you out to dinner when you are eighteen, if your mother lets me? Now don’t forget will you?’ ‘No, I won’t,’ I said, floating out of that theatre on air. What a little charm can do!
Because Esmond looked you straight in the eye, it was impossible to believe he couldn’t see you. A classical leading man, he was on his way to becoming a major star when, in 1941, on HMS Prince of Wales, an exploding shell blinded him in one eye and partially blinded him in the other. His complete lack of self-pity had he and I regularly playing marbles with his glass eye. Out it popped and was added to the beautiful, opaque, vein-threaded marbles Dad had brought home from China. After the game was over, I would hunt for it, he would pretend to hunt for it, a quick dust and back it was popped.
Esmond was one of the kindest men I ever met, and I was immensely fond of him. Cuddling up to him on the sofa, I would ask, and he would tell me, over and over again, what I wanted to hear about Marilyn Monroe. ‘Tell me again Es,’ I would say, and he would, as though it were the very first time. He had worked with her on The Prince and the Showgirl and, although he liked her very much, like so many before him, he said she could be infuriating to work with. Sensing my disappointment, he always added that her adorable charm made it impossible to be cross for long. Then, attempting to hide his boredom, he went on to describe in detail her skin, her clothes, her height, her weight, her laugh, until at last we were interrupted and poor Esmond was finally allowed some peace.
Maeve’s little joke, ‘How can you tell a bore? Ask them how they are and they tell you,’ stood her in good stead. It wasn’t actually true, she was immensely sympathetic, but was absolutely of the ‘get on with it’ generation, who had gone through a war and learned the hard way that things sometimes got better if you didn’t talk about them. Finding it such a bore to talk about her own troubles may have been one of the reasons she was always so popular, and her friends remained the same friends until the day she died. Every year there were a few additions, handsome young poets and dashing young editors, who arrived as fans of Mervyn’s and became friends with Maeve. Paul Chown, a young librarian at the Westminster Library, remembered her. ‘It was always gin, which she could never remember, or perhaps quite believe, that I didn’t like, and a lump of cheese cut into little squares. I think I began to believe she lived on gin and cheese. I would have believed anything: it was all magic to me.’
Michael Moorcock arrived at the house in Surrey when I was seven and he was a seventeen-year-old fan of Mervyn’s. He was the same age as Sebastian and Fabian but, although I was a child and he an incredibly talented and hardworking teenager, he always took notice. His deep affection for my parents and theirs for him has been a constant backdrop to my life, and I think of him as an extension of our family. He’s always been there, a support, an ally and a friend, and the first person I rang after Maeve died.
When I was fourteen, he asked whether I would like to play ‘The Girl’ in a film he was writing and directing, a role, I think, intrinsic to the whole movie. I was picked up early every morning and spent the next few weeks wandering around a bomb-site in Ladbroke Grove, feeling unbearably self-conscious. But Michael was endlessly encouraging. ‘Fantastic work, Clare,’ he’d say, as ‘wooden’ took on a new dimension, far beyond the realms of Stanislavski’s darkest nightmare. I don’t know what happened to the film, I never saw it, but somewhere out there, coiled in a circular tin, on a dusty shelf, in some unknown room are reels showing a brown-haired girl in a black duffel coat, standing stiff as a cricket bat and mute as – a mute.