January 2016
The year has begun with my friend and neighbour Delena’s annual New Year party. A gathering-together of old friends. It is markedly less crowded nowadays, and those that manage it up the stairs are grateful for the resulting availability of seats. I feel positively sprightly compared to one guest with a broken femur, another a failed back operation, two stroke survivors and an assortment of less than successful hip and knee replacements. The general trend of the conversation was the increasing inability to learn lines, the depressing type of roles that we were being called on to play, the lack of projection in younger actors and shock-horror that some are actually being miked. (Good thing too, I think. Makes life much easier.) The moans were conveyed with loud hilarity at past adventures and present ills. One erstwhile roué was still relentlessly flirting from the sofa, undaunted by the fact he couldn’t get up off it. Old age was mocked and defied by this joyous gathering.
February 2016
No one demonstrates the resilience of the old better than my sister Billie. After a lifetime of working in variety and cabaret all over the world with her husband, Roy, they retired to live in Norfolk when he could no longer work on the stilts used in their act. Billie had no roots that could be called home, as we moved about so much as children, whereas her husband’s family, led by his father, well-known Northern comic and theatre owner Roy Barbour, were well established in Lowestoft and Blackpool, which is why Billie and Roy opted to set up home in the North.
She did her best to settle into this new way of life. When her husband died of a stroke, she stuck out a year living alone in the Broads, working in the local charity shop and trying to adapt to a nice little house instead of her touring caravan or her tiny flat in Paris. She played with the neighbours’ children, and, as my father had done when he first lived in a house as opposed to digs, she created a colourful little garden.
Suddenly, on reaching eighty, she freaked out, put her cat in a basket, and went to join a bunch of friends from her past working life living in Antibes. Her best friends Stella, a member of a distinguished circus family, and Nicky, a showgirl, model, half of a fabulous cowboy lasso act, and latterly dress-shop owner, welcomed her with open arms, along with Juliana and Bob, whose enormous rare-breed cats Billie cared for sometimes, staying in their luxury flat overlooking the sea. Her social life was a whirl and, as I discovered when I visited them, the most enormous fun.
I organised a dinner party at her favourite local restaurant to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. Family and friends awaited her entrance, knowing that she had spent weeks getting her nails and hair done and choosing her outfit and jewellery. I was beginning to worry at the lateness of her arrival when a distraught Stella rushed in to say Billie had fallen and could not get up. My son-in-law was left to entertain the motley party guests with his fragmented French, while my daughter Ellie Jane and I dashed round to her flat. We found Billie on the floor. She struggled desperately to pretend she was okay and could go to her party, but was obviously seriously injured.
In France you call the fire brigade if you need an ambulance, and the drama of the incident was somewhat lightened by the arrival of two devastatingly handsome paramedics. Even Billie, who it turned out had broken her hip and was in agony, perked up no end.
After days of medical investigation the doctor told us, with a solemn face, that at her age the likelihood of being able to walk again was minimal, but they would provide her with care and a wheelchair, or she could go into a home. Mercifully I don’t think he understood Billie’s English swear words, but he did flinch slightly at the flashing of her eyes and her shaking fist.
So my sister went into a splendid rehabilitation centre where she insisted on going to the gym twice a day. A month later she was walking round the grounds on the trainer’s arm, and, shortly after that, with merely a stick for support. She just refused to listen to the ‘Well, at your age what can you expect?’ brigade. The trainer told me it was a complete miracle. Knowing my sister, I would categorise it more as complete bloody-mindedness.
March 2016
My professional life seems to have come full circle. The first theatre to which I was contracted was the Theatre Royal, Oldham. It is no more. It was on its way to being no more when I worked there fresh from drama school in 1951. The roof leaked so that the audience had to constantly move seats to avoid dripping rainwater, and the dressing rooms had no heating, and cracked black-pitted mirrors surrounded by broken lightbulbs. Before entering you had to bang on the door to tell the mice that their shift was over and they should stop eating the greasepaint. Cut to 2016. We no longer use sticks of make-up made by Leichner, with numbers five and nine mixed in your hand being the favourite for a natural skin tone, but the Southwark Playhouse dressing room I was in recently for a production of a musical called Grey Gardens was no improvement on the Theatre Royal. The mice there were very happy with crumbs of the Jaffa Cakes that the cast were all addicted to. In fact, I have gone down slightly in dressing-room status, as at least in Oldham the men and women were separate; in Southwark we had one room for everyone, with clothes-hanging rails draped with sheets down the middle to separate the sexes. Very soon any semblance of propriety was abandoned, and men and women alike pranced about in their underwear. On the face of it, it doesn’t look like progress. I have luxuriated in the Number One dressing room in the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and several other West End theatres, so surely it is a sad plight after six decades of work to be dumped in a rough-and-ready fringe theatre.
Actually, not only was the musical a huge success, with people queuing for returns during its sell-out run, but I loved every minute of being in the venue. To get backstage you have to go through the bar where the audience are carousing before and after the show, which if you’re in a flop must be an ordeal, but we had a ball. The show worked better than it would have done – and apparently did in New York, where it was behind a proscenium arch – because we had the audience seated around us within touching distance, giving us actors a thrilling awareness of their deep involvement in the true story of these relatives of the Kennedy family, living in squalor with hundreds of cats, hating and loving one another intensely. One night I dried in a song and turned to someone in the front row, saying, ‘I’ve no idea what comes next.’ And he told me. He’d seen the show several times, he loved it so much. It was theatre as it should be. The venue is irrelevant as long as there is that mystical bond between a group of people and a story being told.
Sadly the Theatre Royal was demolished, but there is still a thriving theatre, the Coliseum, in Oldham. Southwark Playhouse and its mice are planning to move to two splendid new spaces in the area.
I, too, am struggling on.
May–June 2016
One of the big advantages of my chosen career for me now is that there is no retirement age. I am not suddenly deemed redundant and unable to work so long as I can remember the words and stumble across the stage or set without bumping into the scenery. I might even be called ‘a national treasure’ or even ‘a legend’ for managing to do so. On the other hand, on the day I reached eighty I was considered twice as likely to drive badly as the day before, thus justifying a doubling of my insurance overnight – a totally unproven assumption, as I revealed in a television programme I made about the subject. Luckily my profession continues to consider me employable, although the roles increasingly require me to die or go senile. One that didn’t is the film I have made over the last two months that is one of the most fulfilling jobs I have ever had.
When I was sent the script of Edie, about an old woman who, having been for years the carer of her unlovable husband, decides, on his death, to go to Scotland and climb a mountain, I thought there must be some mistake. In my profession I have always been a sort of also-ran. I am happily aware that a bevy of actors has usually been approached for a part before they come to me – although nowadays the bevy is rather reduced as some have dropped off the twig. Despite my success in Grey Gardens, I know that a performance in a fringe theatre does not carry much weight in the film world. This script had a wonderful part in a charming story and I couldn’t understand why the many actors ahead of me in the pecking order had not gobbled it up.
I duly met the producer and director in a club, and they had indeed seen me in Grey Gardens and wanted me to play the role. I was about to hug them both, laughingly saying that, ‘Of course the climbing will be done with green screen, won’t it?’
Silence.
The long and the short of it was that, no, they wanted me to actually climb the bloody mountain.
All was suddenly clear. Many of my contemporaries have the afflictions of old age that would render such extreme demands impossible, and anyway they have already done wonderful leading roles, and would now prefer to put their feet up, or work in a lovely studio with a comfy dressing room. Or at a warm location in a luxurious Winnebago. It is the mark of my still-lethal ambition that I asked the producer to give me a night to think about it.
I talked to the director of the health club where I occasionally did a gentle workout, asking if he thought I could get fit enough to climb a mountain in three months. He blanched only slightly and consulted his top trainer, whose whole life is spent breaking records of one sort or another, and who wasn’t going to be defeated by my shrivelled muscles and thinning bones. So, it was all systems go. Every other day in the gym, lifting weights, speeding on the treadmill, developing bulges in arms and legs which hadn’t been there for years. In addition, I trained in Richmond Park with an ex-RAF officer at walking in bog and up and down slopes. At the double.
By the time I arrived at Lochinver, where cast and crew were to live together in a hunting lodge, I felt incredibly fit. We had a few days to get to know each other before setting off on the long trip to the foot of the Suilven mountain, filming scenes as we went. It was a challenge. Stumbling over a bog full of horrific Scottish beasties, one minute falling flat on my face over a tussock, the next up to my knees in mud, is not what a nice English girl from Hammersmith is used to. All of the time, looming ahead, was Suilven, getting bigger and bigger the nearer we got to it.
Suilven is a curious mountain, rising vertically from the wilderness with an unusual plum-pudding top. And huge. It took several days to reach its foot, including rowing over a loch, which is not the elegant, gliding sport it appears to be, but rather takes all your strength and gives you blisters. And I had my first experience since the Brownies of sleeping, or rather not sleeping, in a tent. On the first evening, in an effort to show the right Nature-loving spirit, I pointed out a pretty snake slithering past my tent door, only to have hysterics when one of the crew said it was poisonous. When I eventually staggered to the actual foot of the mountain, my legs were shaking more from fear than exhaustion.
Seeing my stricken face, the first assistant took me aside and said, ‘This is your last chance to back out, Sheila. The climb is going to take two or three days, shooting as we go, and we will be sleeping in tents. Once you start there is nowhere for a helicopter to land apart from the top, so you will have to continue.’ I looked at the first slope; the crew were already clambering up it, laden with heavy cameras and sound equipment. I had grown fond of these young men and women and the thought of giving up and letting them down was out of the question.
A ghillie, Reuben, a man who knew everything about the geology and history of the landscape, was assigned to work out where I should put my hands and feet when scrambling over the rocks. He was concerned about my age and insisted that I have a break every ten minutes. A plan which soon proved unfeasible for a low-budget film. His technique to keep me going was, if I managed a tricky bit, to reward me with a jelly baby. Kevin Guthrie, who played my young friend, was endlessly solicitous. His main advice was ‘Don’t look down, for God’s sake don’t look down.’
The biggest problem for me was the absence of toilets. The mountain is bare of trees or bushes so there is nowhere to hide, plus those Scottish beasties are waiting to bite your bum the minute you squat in their beautiful national park. To begin with, the crew were told to look the other way, but eventually I went native and behaved like other animals in the wild. Until Calum, a local man, came to my rescue.
I am always fascinated by the effect the presence of a film unit can have on the residents at the location of a shoot. Usually it starts with suspicion and grudging cooperation. Not surprisingly, as film units are a motley crew. They are clothed for the weather and usually unkempt and tired, and at the end of a hard day’s shooting they like a drink. In a remote place it can be a frightening invasion of the usual calm and order. Thus it was in Lochinver. The pie shop and the pub were pleased to see us, but the locals were wary of these rogues and vagabonds, as we used to be called. As always, when they became extras, the inhabitants were baffled by the boring repetition and long waits involved in the process of making a film, but once they got to know us most of them were intrigued. There is always much laughter and affection that gels a random group of technicians and actors, all away from home and united in creating a piece of work. Sometimes a local person living a nice, comfortable, steady life finds it exciting.
I remember, several years ago, a film unit descending on the village we then lived in in Wiltshire, taking over the local manor house for the making of an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The manor house’s owner, a rather cantankerous old woman, at first hid away from the invading army, but was lured into eating on the catering bus. The cheery, disrespectful ribaldry of the crew – ‘Hello, my darling, come to join the plebs, have you?’ – was something she had never been exposed to and she fell in love with it. The humour, the dedication and the albeit temporary affection enchanted her. When the circus moved on, I imagine she felt very sad, as we all do when a job ends. But for us it is usual.
In Lochinver we were blessed with Calum, who was intrigued by our way of life. He lived and worked locally and started working as an extra with us, or a ‘supporting player’ as we now call it, but gradually became indispensable. He was knowledgeable about the landscape and could turn his hand and mind to anything. He invented a plastic-and-wooden lavatory for me which he would set up and conceal, and then stand guard while I used it. Calum told me our arrival had changed his life and he was going to rethink everything. He even played a small role in the film, proving himself to be a subtle and charming actor in his first part. He looked out for me, always warning me of the importance of keeping warm, hypothermia being a real threat for someone of my age.
One night I did actually think I might die. We had to camp on a ledge above the clouds. I had thermal underwear, several layers of clothes, hats and gloves, and a supposedly insulated tent. Here comes one of those superlatives I hate but I mean it: I have never been so cold in my life. What I had forgotten, when layering myself up, was the state of my bladder. It was pitch-dark with a sheer drop to oblivion outside my tent. Stripping off and crouching outside, trying not to wake anyone else, I was terrified. And frozen to the bone. I spent the rest of the night with my teeth chattering. Yes, they actually do clack and chatter with cold. When I saw the sun peeping over the distant horizon at dawn, I understood why primitive man worshipped it. How anyone can think that camping is fun is beyond me.
The last lap of the climb was the toughest. Crossing a metre-wide, very long path with a vertical drop either side was the only time I actually wept with fear, my whimpering allayed by an extra helping of jelly babies. After the final rock scramble, egged on by Kevin, flat on my stomach, I wriggled onto the top. In the script, when she reaches the top, Edie is supposed to whoop and dance in triumph. Physically doing the climb, rather than mocking it up with technology, was justified when I realised that, although in terms of the story jumping about and shouting seemed right, in actual fact it was impossible. The sheer wonder of what I experienced as I stood on that unexpectedly grassy summit took my breath away, and I was struck dumb. Miles and miles of wilderness on all sides. No sign of life. Not a road, not a house. Reuben pointed to a dark patch on the ground below and told me geologists had proved it to have been there since the beginning of time.
Throughout my long life I have had a few experiences that have shaken me to the core of my being – transcendental, revelatory. This was one. I did not feel diminished, a tiny human in this vast world; I felt part of it, absorbed, embraced, part of Nature. I felt I belonged to this wild, bleak, magnificent place. My body had lain against the mountain’s cliff face, I’d clung to it with my hands, trusted my feet on its stones, and it had befriended me.
The sun was setting and we needed to get it on film. A helicopter took most of the crew off, as they wanted a final shot of Kevin and me, with no one around. The pilot was agitated as we were above the clouds and it was getting dark. The brilliant director of photography, August Jakobsson, wanted a last shot from the helicopter. As it passed, the wind from its blades nearly blew us over the edge and scuppered the whole operation by killing off the leading characters. Eventually, they came back for us. The helicopter ride in the dark, back to base, was the most frightening part of the entire shoot. When we got back, there was drinking and cheering and hugging.
There is nothing better than the feeling that you have done a good job on something; it can be doing the ironing, arranging some flowers, making a child laugh, or climbing a mountain to film a good story. That night a mutual sense of achievement was celebrated with joy.
For me, I was aware that something profound has happened to my – what? My soul?
June 2016
Much as I loved Scotland, I am glad to get back to London and indulge in my usual round of concerts, theatre and long lunches with my mates at my slightly decadent, bohemian club in Soho. My ecstatic reaction to the landscape of the Highlands took me by surprise. I think of myself as a city girl. I love the pace, the people, the easy access to cafés, galleries, theatres and parks. In London I enjoy the jangle of different languages, the kaleidoscope of ethnicity. I relish the unpredictability. I walk its streets and turn down some passageway and find a new mews or building I didn’t know was there. It seems an amorphous mass but, if you live here, you know that it is a series of villages each with its own character: elegant Hampstead, raffish Spitalfields, boisterous Brixton. Cities can and do absorb anyone. Areas change according to the influx of new people. Settlers in London have been Roman, Huguenot, Jewish, Irish, Jamaican, Arab, Somali, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese – you name it, they’ve come here. Troublemakers have tried to stop this flow with their hatred and fear, but cities will continue to embrace change, which is probably why most of them would prefer to leave open the doors to Europe. ‘The metropolitan elite’ is a label currently used as an insult which, if ‘elite’ is taken to mean aiming high, to be better, to be special, I embrace. These are things all of us should aspire to. For our country, as well as ourselves.
On Suilven I felt that Nature could be my friend. I had never really felt that before. Always slightly on edge, I have gone on family country walks and admired the views, whilst secretly looking forward to visiting the nearest pub. I feel more relaxed in the hubbub of a city than in the quiet of the country. I am less frightened of passing a gang of seemingly threatening youths than of crossing a field of horses or even sheep. A hunt in full cry, shouting, blaring horns, baying hounds, is scarier to me than a noisy demonstration in Trafalgar Square. I am, I suppose, scared of the country, just as the folks who live there are appalled by London.
I blame the war.
As a child whose playground was bombsites, I was more thrilled by collecting shrapnel, machine-gun bullets, shells and bomb fragments than posies of wildflowers. When I was evacuated it was the first time I had lived in the country. I was terrified of the monster cows in the field next door to my billet. I will still walk miles to avoid crossing a field in which they are grazing, however peaceably. I am more at home in rural France because, where I live, there are no animals in the fields.
When I was a child we left King’s Cross to live in suburbia. Not only that but my parents gave up working in hotels and pubs and took jobs that meant regular hours, my dad in a factory, my mum in a shop. I don’t know how happy they were about that. My dad must have missed the boisterous companionship of being a landlord but the decision could have had something to do with his partiality to a drink – or two – or several. They also probably thought their children needed more stability. In which case, where we moved to was not ideal. During the Blitz, Bexleyheath and the area around it was known as Bomb Alley; it was organised to defend the armament factories Vickers-Armstrongs in Crayford and the Woolwich Arsenal, as well as the docks. With the deafening mobile ack-ack gun behind the house, searchlights, barrage balloons and constant dogfights as the Nazi bombers were confronted by Spitfires overhead, there was no lack of excitement, but when the war ended I found Bexleyheath deadly dull. The bustle and noise of the pub customers in King’s Cross, even the odd fight, the winkle and shrimp barrows on Sundays, the Salvation Army bands, the crowds, the buses, the trains that ran under our yard shaking the glasses, were replaced by genteel calm.
On country walks, if there are no actual people around, I will look for traces of them: ruined tin mines in Cornwall, what is left of our mining industry in the Midlands and the North, old barns and farm buildings in the countryside. Halfway up Suilven is a substantial dry-stone wall. It serves no obvious purpose and makes no sense. Its origin is shrouded in mystery but it almost certainly is what is known as a destitution wall. In the Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many people were driven from their homes and land to accommodate a growth in sheep farming by the landowners. That together with the potato famine, which devastated Scotland as well as Ireland, forced many to emigrate, and those who remained were poverty-stricken. In order to receive meagre subsistence, they were made to work on pointless tasks such as building unnecessary roads, the so-called destitution roads. Most likely some Highlander walked miles from a distant village every day, and then climbed Suilven with massive stones, and constructed this monument to inhumanity.
He used his skill and strength to create something beautiful. I imagine he ended up with more self-respect than the man who tried to humiliate him. The landowner probably laughed with his friends about the ludicrous task he set the Highlander, but I suspect that to have daily communion, in sun and storm, with that magical mountain, crafting something that future generations would admire, means that the labourer had the last laugh.
Alone as he was, he probably felt an affinity to Nature. I remember when John used to ask me to join him looking at the stars at our French home – we no longer see them in big over-lit cities – I would have a quick look and say, ‘Yes, lovely’, and carry on cooking supper. He would stand there for ages, and I think now that he probably knew that feeling of being part of the universe. And I didn’t understand it. How sad that I was too busy to try. On our last visit to our French home, when he was mortally ill, though weak he stood stock-still, for over half an hour, looking at the view of the mountains, forest and blue, blue sky. Then again, on the last evening, he sat outside staring at the stars for a very long time. Is it any wonder that I now, eighteen years after his death, still feel his presence, his energy?
Can I ever, before my own inevitable death, set aside my sensible, rational approach to life and contemplate the inexplicable?
June 2016
The night before the referendum vote as to whether the United Kingdom wishes to leave the European Union, I went on a television debate and tried to explain why I personally want us to remain.
When I arrived at the venue, people were huddled in groups waiting to go into the studio, so I made my way towards the one gathered around Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s ideas man, hoping for support. They barely acknowledged my arrival, apart from slight irritation that I had interrupted their flow. This was a serious matter and I was just an elderly woman, and a silly actress to boot. When it came to my turn to speak on the debate, I was introduced by Jeremy Paxman with a jolly jibe that I should be voting for Brexit like all the old people. The audience disapproved of his rudeness; I was grateful to him because he got them on my side.
There was a gauge in the studio to demonstrate the effect of the speeches on undecided voters. Unlike most of the other speakers, my reasons for remaining were nothing to do with trade, or how much richer or poorer we would be if we left the European Union. I spoke from the heart, and it must have had some resonance because the gauge shot round to ‘Remain’ as I spoke, leaving Jeremy open-mouthed, and, bless him, delighted. My grandchildren told me later that my piece had ‘gone viral’ on the web, which they assured me was paradoxically a good thing.
After the programme, the great and the good congratulated me effusively, including Alastair C. What thrilled me most was a hug from Delia Smith, my saviour at many a social occasion. That was much more impressive to me than the fact that the prime minister, David Cameron, sent out a message on social media telling people to look at what I had said before they voted.
The argument I put forward was one I heard little then and have rarely heard since, whenever Brexit is discussed. The gist of my contribution was that, as a child during the war, I was bombed, and my friends and neighbours killed, by the Germans. I went to bed underground in our damp air-raid shelter and listened to the zooming planes and guns fighting life-and-death battles in the skies above. Our house lost its roof and windows in the bombardment. At seven years old my case was packed, my gas mask put over my shoulder and a label tied to my coat, and I was sent off to the country and billeted on strangers. I was terrified for most of my childhood.
And I hated the Germans.
My first husband, Alec Ross, served in the RAF during the war when he was involved in destroying German cities and killing thousands of their citizens.
And the Germans, in their turn, hated him.
Sometime after VJ Day, the Fricker boy from next door came back skeletal and mute from the horrors he had endured in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.
And I hated the Japanese.
Then we did the unthinkable. Not once but twice, we backed the United States in obliterating two huge areas of Japan with atomic bombs. Killing and maiming thousands.
And surely to God they hated us.
But somehow, out of this maelstrom of hatred came the idea of a united Europe. Encouraged by our hero Winston Churchill, the countries that had been involved in two world wars, killing 40 million in the first, and 70 million in the second, would unite to create a better, more peaceful continent. It was a step towards a united world.
After the war my father made me look at pictures of Belsen. One photo in particular is branded on my brain. It is of a terrified naked child standing on a laboratory bench being pointed at with a stick, watched by uniformed Nazi officers and white-coated doctors. My father did not spare my eleven-year-old self the horrors of Dr Mengele’s experiments on Jewish and Roma children in the camps. As I cried, he told me, ‘For their sake, this must never happen again. It is down to you.’
I am fairly certain my dad, like me, would have rejoiced to see a united Europe based on liberal principles. It was our way of trying to ensure that worldwide strife on this scale would never happen again. A united world. Idealistic? Yes. Difficult? Fearsomely. But essential? Yes. Surely it’s only by working together that we can resolve the huge problems of inequality and poverty, the mass movement of populations – which the word ‘immigration’ does not adequately describe – and the destruction of our planet? The European Union was one faltering, difficult step towards that. Much has gone wrong. But with commitment and will, we could’ve made something wonderful.
In one day, 23 June 2016, all that has gone. The result was 51.89 per cent to leave and 48.11 per cent to remain. (I will always worry that the 3.78 per cent margin was my fault.)
July 2016
Our country is now riven and fragmented. There are rifts being whipped up between city and country, North and South, young and old. At the height of the pre-referendum war of rhetoric, a young MP, Jo Cox, who once said in the House of Commons that we ‘have more in common than that which divides us’, was shot and viciously stabbed to death in public by a tragically deluded man shouting, ‘Britain first.’
Since the very close result of the referendum, I have somewhat half-heartedly taken part in campaigns to stop some of the damage that I believe will happen if we sever ourselves from our neighbours. Has happened. I suppose I am one of the metropolitan elite, a saboteur, a traitor, a Remoaner, a citizen of nowhere, and all the other put-downs thrown at those of us who voted against leaving. (Not to mention the 30 per cent who did not vote at all. Shame on them.)
Some are furious with people like me, who they think don’t understand what it is for a community to lose its identity. I do, my beloved fellow countrymen (and women!), I do.
In Oldham, where I worked for a year in the fifties, I saw the decline of the cotton trade. The influx of workers from Pakistan prepared to work for less money and worse conditions, who became ghettoised in various pockets of the town, plus the destruction of the back-to-back houses, unsanitary, rudimentary, but immaculately kept, and sociable, caused damage to the existing strong, white, working-class culture. When the mills closed, there was a gradual breakdown of a whole way of life, with no intervention early on, when it would have made a difference.
I was staying in Workington when they closed the steelworks, the epicentre of the life of the town. A couple of men rendered unemployed by the closure warned me that older men would no longer be able to advise and keep an eye on the younger, and a soft-toy factory was no replacement for the virile work at the steelworks. They predicted that the whole town would fall apart. When I went back to do a radio show a few years later I could see the signs of decline in this previously buoyant town. I was told by the locals how pleasant life used to be. I was given a sketch by Lowry of the nearby seaside town Maryport, back when it was a beach for families to enjoy, with boats, and sandcastles, and the whippet dogs they used to race. Even that was now polluted, and destroyed by the sea coming from nearby Windscale, as it used to be called, until, after a disastrous accident at the plant, it was renamed Sellafield. Cumbria has not been taken care of.
The mining communities too, where a bitter battle was fought to save not just jobs but a whole way of life, were obliterated and just left to rot. Did no one foresee the social problems that would follow? Or did they just not care?
All of them shamefully ignored by successive British governments. And now they blame the EU.
I am enraged that we have, in my opinion, been manipulated by the unscrupulous campaigning of an unelected political adviser called Dominic Cummings, who plainly despises long-established government procedure and appears willing to tell any lie, or use any simplistic brainwashing slogan, to achieve his fanatical ends, supposedly on behalf of the likes of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Arron Banks and Jacob Rees-Mogg, but actually intent on a revolution far beyond their Brexit dreams.
A like-minded friend suggested that we are like all old people, who don’t embrace change, and moan about how wonderful life was when we were young. As I have pointed out, for me it wasn’t. War was vile, and poverty was grinding. My generation, and that of my parents, toiled to make things better and succeeded to an amazing degree, but one of those achievements is now on the rubbish dump. Many of the liberal values we fought for are now ridiculed, kindness and respect for minorities has become ‘political correctness gone mad’, and racism and anti-Semitism are on the rise.
Many Remainers, after fruitlessly trying to make their voices heard, with no leadership, and a pro-Leave press, have become sad but resigned. Not me. I am still in turmoil. I have had two quite serious brushes with depression in my life and I know the signs. I am aware my reaction is bordering on the unhinged.
November 2016
On 5 November, competing with the Guy Fawkes fireworks, a virulent rash exploded on my legs. The irritation took over my whole being in its intensity. I couldn’t think of anything else. I have always thought that if I were ever paralysed and unable to communicate, not being able to ask for relief for an unbearable itching would be worse than silent pain. I was unable to sleep or work, and the only temporary balm proved to be, contrary to all advice, having a scalding-hot shower. Remembering my cancer years, when I believed my body was telling me that I needed to get rid of a growing destructive element in my life, I sought to explain my all-consuming, ugly, erupting skin. Could it be that my obsession with the volcanic changes in the world had entered my bloodstream? Was it that picture of Trump and Farage that was all over the press, standing in front of some garish golden doors, like a couple of gleeful louts, Trump, grinning maniacally, doing a thumbs-up sign, and Farage, not sure what to do with his hands in the absence of his customary pint of beer, gesturing awkwardly towards his new best pal, whilst giving one of his usual obscene, gape-mouthed, roaring laughs? Two squalid opportunists, in cahoots in their triumphant boys’ adventure of changing the world. And giving me a rash. The bastards.
2016 has been an earthquake of a year. I feel alienated, at least from my country, if not the world. I am reminded of a visit I made to my beloved Auntie Ruby in 1999. After a lifetime of independent spinsterhood, in which she’d bestowed her generous love on me and many others, she eventually had a fall and stairs became a problem, so I found her a nice residential home into which she seemed to settle. After a few months I noticed she had stopped doing her Telegraph crossword. In those days the Telegraph was an excellent newspaper, and she usually spent the morning reading it. When I visited we would discuss world events. One day I went to see her – it was at the height of the revelations of genocide in Kosovo, while the other news was of schoolboys killing their colleagues in Columbine, and a nail bomb exploding in a gay pub in Soho. We would normally have had a good debate about the state of the world, but that day she seemed reluctant to engage. She explained she no longer read her lovely Telegraph. With tears in her eyes, she told me, ‘It’s not my world now, darling. I don’t belong here any more.’ I was angry that she would opt out of what she had taught me to challenge with relish, and had become apathetic and detached, preferring to talk about the pleasure of our Victoria sponge and Earl Grey tea. Now I understand.
My dear Auntie Ruby died shortly after that last conversation. Do I, like her, just give up and recognise that I am a dinosaur that has outlived its viability in this new world? My evacuation experience taught me to get up if I was knocked down and fight back, with my fists if necessary. That’s easier when you are eight years old, but maybe I could still winch my old bones out of the Slough of Despond. Maybe I should evoke the spirit of Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Right now, I just don’t have the energy.
November 2016
Decided to escape to France, hoping the locals won’t blame me for Brexit. My friends at Marseilles Airport and the car-hire firm just shake their heads and look at me with pity.
Winter is not the ideal time to visit Provence. It was below freezing when I arrived but I took profound satisfaction in collecting kindling from the field and concocting faggots with painstaking folding of newspaper, then gradually feeding in logs, until the stove roared into life. With no leaves on the trees, I could see the cradle of mountains that encircle the horizon. The landscape palette was brown, black, green, blue, purple, and the quivering silver of the aspen trees. Nature had turned the landscape into a sculpture. As I cuddled down in front of the stove listening to my old-fashioned cassette tapes, I was warmed with pleasure and gratitude that I have this refuge. Whatever the turmoil in the world outside, this place remains constant.
I love being in France. I am, and always will be, British, but from that root grows something larger. I, like my grandchildren, absolutely feel part of a big multicultural European hotchpotch of races, linked together, striving to share our wealth and success and troubles with one another. When I did Who Do You Think You Are?, I discovered I have German ancestry; there are very few of us on this island who do not have blood ties with other Europeans. Way back we were actually joined geographically. That my country is at present cutting through these roots, and forcibly ripping me away, is leaving this gaping, bleeding wound in my life that I have yet to find a way of staunching.
After an evening of wound-licking, the next day I pulled myself together. I was about to put on John’s old location jacket to go into Apt, our nearest market town, when I remembered the hem of my fifty-year-old grey corduroy trousers was hanging over my shoes and dragging on the ground, as it had for several months. It was growing fear of old-lady falls and broken hips that made me sit, leg balanced on the table, sewing it back in place with an approximation of the hemstitch I learned at school seventy-odd years ago. People don’t stitch and patch and darn like we used to back in the day. All my clothes were made to last, with seams that could be let out and hems that could be lengthened to allow for growth. Dad had leather patches on the elbows of his jacket, sheets were cut in two and remade with less-worn sides to middle, and socks and gloves sported intricate darns woven on a wooden mushroom. All my clothes as a child were remade versions of my mother’s or big sister’s garments. Never for one moment did it occur to me that I might be hard done by, except when my scholarship provided the fees for my grammar school but I found myself the only girl whose tunic and blouse, and even green serge knickers, were home-made. I was too mortified to appreciate that my mother, who worked in a shop six days a week, must have toiled over the Singer sewing machine until the small hours to provide my uniform.
My trousers now trip-proof, I donned the ancient big black jumper which my mother had knitted for me when another scholarship led to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. On this occasion, Kent County Council generously provided me with a modest maintenance fee (which wouldn’t happen now), but it didn’t stretch to buying one of the sloppy joe jumpers that were all the rage. Mum’s trusty knitting needles did the job and I still, to this day, relish its baggy warm embrace. My wardrobe in France is all my cast-offs from London. Unrecognised, I wander around with no make-up, lank unwashed hair and ragged old thrown-together ensembles. In Chiswick I could well be considered a bag lady and social services would step in. Here in France they just accept that Englishwomen are not very chic and don’t have a weekly manicure and coiffure done by either a shop or a friend. They assume that I am a bit eccentric, like the very tall Arab who wanders around muttering to himself, and who once startled me by wordlessly forcing a Babybel cheese into my hands, possibly thinking my need was greater than his.
In Apt I am always greeted fondly by our newsagent, Karim, who keeps The Times and a day-old Guardian for me and scans the pages for news of me and two other English actors who live in the area. These cuttings he gives to me discreetly, conscious that I value my anonymity, but unaware that I hate reading anything about myself and so throw away his review or comment without looking at it. I said hello to a couple of old English blokes who take a morning drink at the old-fashioned zinc bar that I frequent for its excellent coffee. They did once tell the Gauloises-smoking, Pernod-quaffing owner I was ‘une grande vedette’, but his Gallic shrug revealed that he considered Les Anglais’ age and alcohol intake to have addled their cheerful brains.
My evolution into a proud European took time. It started when I was fourteen, in 1947. I am not sure how it came about, but two of my teachers – surprisingly jaunty women when stripped of their gowns and teaching demeanour – took me to Paris to spend the summer holiday as an au pair with a friend of theirs, whose husband was the director of the Comédie-Française theatre. I had done a couple of school plays and maybe they thought I merited encouragement.
I don’t remember all the details of this, my first venture abroad, but suffice it to say it had a profound effect. I remember we saw the detritus of battle on the deserted beaches, and Paris must have been a sombre place, but my recollection is of mind-blowing sophistication. War and want had rendered my childhood devoid of much in the way of worldly pleasures. I am sure there was a stratum of society in Britain that knew about olive oil and wine, but for me, who had only ever tasted our annual Christmas bottle of Barsac, drinking wine at every meal was a revelation. I was taken to a Jacques Fath fashion show and saw the difference between dressmaking and couture. I stood transfixed in the Jeu de Paume gallery before Van Gogh’s inch-deep Starry Night, displayed amongst the first real paintings I had ever seen. My boss Madame Touchard’s sex life was quite unlike my mum’s, who I was not even sure had one, and seemed a lot of fun. I cycled all over the then traffic-free Paris, so it became, and still is, my favourite city in the world, next to London.
In a few short weeks I saw what goodies the world had to offer. I had left behind a world of bomb craters and destruction and found a whole new beautiful place. I was too young to detect the complex wounds of war and occupation in France.
Then in 1949, when I was sixteen, I sewed a Union Jack on a knapsack and with two friends set off to hitch-hike around France, Belgium and Holland, getting various jobs to support ourselves on the way. We were overwhelmed by the hospitality and gratitude we received.
The final stage of my European odyssey was twenty-five years ago, when John and I bought the house in rural France. It seemed a very grown-up thing to buy a property abroad but that’s what we did. Primitive, no central heating, just a wood-burning stove, no pool, no kitchen, rudimentary bathroom, in a small hameau surrounded by lavender and cherry orchards. To begin with, the French were wary of us, but over the years it became our home, to which we sped whenever we weren’t working in England. When John died, in 2002, the agony of his absence made me consider selling the house, but I realised I needed the uncomplicated empathy of my French neighbours. It is unbelievable that John and I, then just I, have lived in Provence for twenty-five years.
This hameau, when I first arrived, consisted of Roger, a French vineyard worker, and his family; Pierre, a retired miner; André and Denis, two brothers who were born and raised in a small cottage; and Monsieur Cros, a schoolteacher, and his family. Into this close community came an English couple and an American woman. What a culture shock that must’ve been. Over the past twenty years, the vineyard was sold to a Swedish businessman who had always dreamed of working on the land, and spends his retirement painstakingly changing the local wine from boxed plonk to a very acceptable rosé. The American woman has been replaced by two Parisians whose second home it is, although one of them went to school in the area and his father used to be mayor. The miner has left to enjoy his generous pension on the coast and instead we have a delightful young woman whom we have watched fall in love and have two children, who wave to me in my kitchen as they cavort naked in the sun. The Swede has tastefully developed a barn into a modern dwelling and another outbuilding into a pottery for his wife. We have grown at ease with one another without invading anyone’s privacy.
A few years ago an Englishwoman with a German husband moved in down the lane, and their warm sociability has woven us into a very close community. They arrange occasional boules matches on our ramshackle rough pitch, and we had a secret party for Denis’s eightieth birthday and mourned together André’s death. So, life has not stood still over the years in this little hameau. The feeling of deep fondness and complete trust that exists between us has developed gradually. I still can’t understand 50 per cent of what Denis says in his Provençal accent but I know he is there for me should I need him.
Getting ready to return to London, I decided to check the postbox at the end of the track. I went via the ancient oak, embracing it as I always do, digging my fingers into its bark, thanking it for being. I stood for a while admiring the blaze of the sunset. Then I banged on the iron postbox and listened for wasps. After cautiously unlocking the door, I was about to tear up the advertising material that had ignored my ‘Pas de Publicité’ notice when I spotted the name of our village in an article on the cover of the local mairie news. It took me a while to translate but its meaning was devastatingly clear. The commune has to build seventy-five new residences by government edict, and our hameau is one of the hamlets designated for expansion.
Blood really does run cold in response to shock. Our ramshackle, ancient, primitive, intimate group of homes is to be desecrated by new building. Strangers will come and break up our little community. Twenty-five years of only slight gradual change, the security of a shared way of life, will be ruined.
The intricate web we have woven over the years will be destroyed by expansion. These newcomers won’t understand our way of life. Why can’t things stay the same?
‘I want my village back.’
November 2016
I had to get back to do some dubbing on a series called Delicious that I had been working on in Cornwall. I have ambivalent feelings towards Cornwall, which voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. While I was filming there during the campaign, I had many an argument with local film crew members, but I did understand why they felt the way they did – the South-West, too, has been neglected. In the wake of another industrial collapse, that of the tin mines, the natives of Cornwall are forced into servicing surfers, second-homers and troublesome tourists whose picnics have turned the seagulls into fat savage predators. There is work in the summer but none in the winter, which is why Cornwall is one of the poorest counties in the UK. I discovered that many people had no idea how much support had come to the area from the European Union. What’s more, after the very successful Leave campaign, they did not care. They just wanted out. Mind you, some Cornish folk hate people from Devon, and given half a chance would build a wall along the Tamar and keep everyone out, let alone nasty Europeans. They hoist their slightly sinister black-and-white Cornish flag and make plans to cut through the border and set Cornwall adrift as an angry little island, living off fish cooked by Rick Stein.
There is one pub that we used to go to where the locals welcomed us with open arms, and we relished the fish, the cider and the yarns of the old regulars. One day one of them told me that his friend, whom I will call Tom, wanted to talk to me but was too shy. Tom and I found a quiet corner and this old man hesitantly told me his story.
Tom was born during the war. His mother, let’s call her Eileen, was not married, which in those days was a shameful situation: ‘I was illegitimate.’ It was even more frowned upon because she had been ‘going with’ an American serviceman. I remember well how reviled the GIs were. They were considered sloppy and spoiled compared with our British troops. Especially risible was their loose-limbed marching. They seemed to have a lot of money to spend and – even more riling for the local men – the girls all thought they were lovely. So did the kids. They were endlessly kind to us vaccies, with copious supplies of goodies. ‘Got any gum, chum?’ was our password to piles of chewing gum, candies and cookies. And they were great dancers. At village socials they whirled the girls around in a way far removed from the stiff stumblings of the local lads. But to ‘go with’ one of these attractive men was considered a betrayal of the English men who were away fighting.
‘She tried to get rid of me’ – Tom said this several times. Maybe it was something his poor ostracised mother would say to him when the strain of being treated as a slut, while single-handedly trying to bring up a child by taking in washing, and cleaning up at the Big House, became too much. I dread to think what that desperate young girl did to herself to try to abort the baby she knew would ruin her life. Because of course the GI left, and Eileen told Tom she never heard from him again.
It was ten years before anyone in the village spoke to her – ten years before Tom said she became ‘respectable’. He was adamant that that was the timescale. Some incident when he was ten years old must have marked a change in some people’s attitude towards him and his mother. Maybe the boy stood up to them after ten years of cruelty. Maybe it was because of changing times, or because their neighbours ultimately had to admire and accept the young woman’s courage. He did not want to elaborate. Eileen never married. Tom looked after her when she grew old and he himself ‘never found the right woman’. I would think his valiant mother would have been a hard act to follow.
But recently something momentous had happened – and that was why he wanted to talk to me. He had received a letter from America, from a grandson of the man who was Tom’s father, who had been exploring his family history and come across Tom. Presumably the GI Joe must have told someone about his love affair during the war, maybe even his wife. Or maybe someone discovered a letter from Eileen. Both of them were now dead. Tom had never really talked about his father with his mother, although she had told him that he was a fine man. Did he know about Tom? If so, why did he not help? Maybe he did. How did his mother afford to buy him a bicycle? There were so many questions, which Tom was happy to leave unanswered.
I could tell that receiving this letter had turned Tom’s life upside down. He was obviously well liked in the pub and I suspect after all these years most of the younger residents did not know about his childhood. He had certainly told no one about this new chain of events. He told me that he had replied to the letter, confirming that they had his mother’s name right, and that he almost certainly was their grandfather’s son. Tom thought, indeed hoped, that would be the end of it.
But the previous week he had received another letter. The grandchildren were planning a party for their father, Tom’s half-brother, a celebration for his eightieth birthday, and would like him to come over, all expenses paid. I grasped his hand as he told me, and my heart sank when he said, ‘What would you do, Sheila?’
My first thought was that of course he should go. The bastards owe him something. It sounds as though Joe’s descendants have had a good life, while Tom and Eileen’s lives were a poverty-stricken struggle. Maybe he would enjoy the adventure of going on an aeroplane for the first time, and a whole new country. He has never been outside Cornwall. The young relatives who made the effort to trace him would probably treat him lovingly. A new generation, not blighted by those bigoted, cruel values of old, would welcome him into their family. What an adventure. That would be my reaction as an endlessly curious woman.
Then I saw the fear in his eyes. It could go horribly wrong. He has a version of his childhood that he has accepted as the truth, the one his mother gave him. What if he discovered that Joe wanted her to take his son out to the US and she, like him now, was afraid to go? What if the grandchildren thought it would be a jolly party jape to bring over their father’s brother but, having maybe had charmed lives themselves, would not understand the sort of unworldly man Tom is? What would these presumably relatively rich Americans make of an old fish-poacher wearing clothes from the charity shop? He had never been to a big lavish party in his life. He was seventy-four. His bitterly hard young life is long forgotten, and his routine, which revolves around catching the odd illicit salmon, and holding court from his seat in the pub, is comfortably set. The wounds of his childhood are buried deep and I saw the danger of digging them up. We talked for a long time and had a good few jars. I helped him weigh up all the options, but told him it had to be his decision.
I held him in my arms as I said goodbye, and he whispered, ‘I don’t need to go there. Tonight has been the best night of my life – meeting you.’
It broke my heart.
That his life should be so low on loveliness that meeting me was a high spot. That the opportunity for betterment in his damaged existence came too late.
Tom has led a good life. He can look back in pride at his survival and defeat of prejudice, at his loving care of his mother. He doesn’t, because he is not aware that they are a reason for pride. Maybe that is why meeting me was important to him. I am probably the only person who has ever told him he is special and, like Eileen said of his father – fine.
December 2016
I had to go to France to join my neighbours in fighting the destructive building directive. I girded my loins and marched up to the mairie to confront the mayor. He once attended one of our parties in the barn, and left in the small hours having supped deep of our local wine, so I hoped he might have a soft spot for our beautiful hameau. True to form he was sweetness and light.
I don’t trust him an inch.