The Headmaster of St Mary’s, when I arrived at the age of nine, was Brother Thompson, a kindly old soul who didn’t bother anybody. A literary man with a keen interest in Celtic mythology, he was the author of ‘Joysticks’ … A Musical Fantasy, the first school play in which I appeared. As Gwen Masterton, one of the Mayfair children, whose chum Dorothy is whooshed off to the Caves of Donegal by wicked elves, I wore a black wig and pink taffeta dress, with white ankle socks and dinky patent leather shoes. (And if you’re wondering, no, I didn’t wear girls’ knickers.) And from the sepia photograph before me, very pretty I looked too, even if someone backstage had been a little heavy-handed with the rouge and the lippy. It seems funny now that Brother Thompson, writing a play for an all-boys school, should have included so many parts for girls. The mythic hero Finn McCool strode about with as much mannishness as a sixteen-year-old could muster, but the stage was usually bedecked with doe-eyed Celtic maidens, clasping hands to boyish breasts and cooing. It was all rather unnerving at the time because, to be honest, I used to fancy one or two of them myself, but fortunately, once the drag came off, so did the fancy.
Then there was the short play he wrote about an imaginary visit to Crosby by Queen Elizabeth the First, which was a one-off performance that took place on the school lawn one beautiful summer’s evening. I didn’t have the biggest speaking part, but as the Queen I was, dare I say it, the star. Again, I wasn’t nervous, remembered all my lines, came in on cue and gabbled loud but clearly. The trouble was, as Miss Allen, the Head of Drama, told me later, that when I wasn’t involved in the action I was inclined to fiddle with my brocade neckline, which apparently queens don’t do, and became more interested in who was in the audience than what was happening on stage. Also, I corpsed. ‘Unforgivable,’ said Miss Allen. ‘Even for a thirteen-year-old.’ I had just sat down on the throne after addressing the good citizens of Crosby when my portly favourite, Lord Scarisbrick, stepped forward, swept the voluminous blue cap from his head and bowed low. Unfortunately, the sweep was over-vigorous and the cap slipped from his fingers. Like a velvet frisbee, it curved above the heads of the groundlings and pancaked into the wall of the gymnasium. My Lord Scarisbrick blushed. I stifled a giggle. A handmaid giggled. A page-boy stifled a blush. My portly lord stifled a corpse. Queen Elizabeth burst out laughing followed loyally by the good people of Crosby.
In 1950 came Toad of Toad Hall. I loved the play but rather resented not playing Ratty or Moley or, better still, Mister Toad, running around the stage going ‘Poop Poop’ all the time. But I was good old Mr Badger, solid and respectable. Perhaps if Brother Thompson had written it instead of Kenneth Grahame, I would have been playing Betty Badger alongside Rosalind Rat and Marcella Mole. Come to think of it, my early acquaintance with the stage play would come in very useful when I found myself locked away in Austerlitz, upper New York state, writing lyrics for The Wind in the Willows, the New Musical, which was to hit Broadway in 1987. I use the word ‘hit’ as in velvet frisbee pancaking into gymnasium wall. But more of that later.
My theatrical swansong was Richard of Bordeaux, in which I played Mary, Countess of Derby. By this time I must have been losing interest in school amdram because I can remember almost nothing of the production except for two things: first, that it was staged not in the school hall, but in the larger Alexandra Hall in Crosby, and second, that it starred Laurence Taylor as King Richard. I remember him out of school, tall, dark and handsome, walking down Bridge Road wearing a long black coat, a red scarf thrown carefully round his neck as if he’d stepped straight out of Lautrec’s portrait of Aristide Bruant. He quit St Mary’s before the sixth form and went on to become Professor of Sociology at York University, and as Laurie Taylor famous as a broadcaster on Radio 4. Back then, though, he was my king and because he loved me desperately (not me personally, you understand, not four-eyes McGough from 4 beta, but the radiant, enigmatic Countess of West Derby), he embraced me on stage and kissed me. On stage; on the lips. We thought nothing of it at the time. No embarrassment in the slightest, but looking back, I bet there were girls in the audience who wished they were in my place. Boys too, I shouldn’t wonder.