Life’s a Scream

It was great to be back in England. Now that George had left Rank we hoped it might make a difference to my re-emergence. Unfortunately it didn’t. The ban on me had run for so long that I was virtually a non-person. To fill the empty hours I began to write a thriller, Cuckoo Run, based on one of the scripts I had touted around Argentina. I had almost completed it when I received a call from Bill Kenwright. Bill managed a touring theatre company, which kept a lot of actors in work. He ran things on a tight budget but was also firm and faithful. He asked if I’d do Dial M for Murder for him on a theatre tour and I quickly accepted.

We opened at the Opera House in Glasgow. Tonio came up for opening night and then went back to London. He was playing with the idea of forming a touring theatre company himself and was working on finding a backer. He drove back up on Saturday, had a kip in my dressing-room, then took me to our house in Richmond.

In the morning he suggested we ate breakfast in the garden. It was perfectly situated, faced south, had huge horse-chestnuts to provide shade and was surrounded by an ancient brick wall. The only thing that spoiled it was the Anderson shelter, a relic from World War Two. When my eyes adjusted to the light I couldn’t believe what I saw. The Anderson shelter was gone and in its place was a bed full of beautiful flowers. I looked around the rest of the garden. In the short time I had been away he had planted flowers everywhere. It was so wonderful that I dissolved into tears.

I’d been crying a lot recently and had also been feeling sick and getting terrible stomach cramps. I knew that I was ill but couldn’t admit it. After all I had gone through, I needed to feel strong. To be ill was to be weak and inferior. So I hadn’t said anything to anyone, not even to Tonio or Steffka. Tone had sensed that I wasn’t well but as I only saw him at weekends while I was touring I’d managed to hide my pain from him.

We were on our way down to Brighton, where I was to open at the Theatre Royal. I’d been feeling unwell all weekend but had covered it by saying I was merely tired and needed to rest. Half-way to Brighton, I had to get Tonio to stop the car so I could be sick. When I finally got back in I was exhausted. Tonio wanted to turn back immediately but I told him not to be silly, that I’d eaten something which didn’t agree with me. He wasn’t convinced. He made me promise that I would go to the doctor the following morning. I said yes but had no intention of going. I was more frightened of finding out something vile than continuing to suffer. But Tonio read my mind and insisted on staying over and taking me to the surgery.

The next morning the doctor made an appointment for me to go immediately to the hospital for tests and within a week ovarian cancer was diagnosed. My initial reaction was anger with myself and with the world, and disbelief. ‘I couldn’t possibly have an operation now,’ I told the surgeon. ‘I’m in the middle of a tour.’

For a while I continued to come up with terrified excuses. I was booked up for only another seven weeks, surely nothing could happen before then . . . But Tonio held the doctor’s line and, moreover, accused me of being selfish: who was going to cook his eggs and bacon on Sunday morning? What about Steffanie . . .?

I dreaded having to tell Bill Kenwright but he was brilliant. When he heard my tale of woe he insisted that I went into hospital at once. Having thought myself indispensable, I was a bit taken aback. Bill told me he would find a stand-in for however long I was away and that as soon as I was better I could take over again, which was the kindest thing he could have done, for it gave me a reason to get on with my recovery.

I didn’t tell my mother about the operation as I didn’t want to upset her, or for her to think I was a weakling, so I pretended I was away in some theatre where it wasn’t possible to get home for the weekend. When I later told her about it she said she had known all along. I’ve no idea how because no one told her.

They wheeled me into theatre and got ready to put me under. I hate that final period before you pass out, when you think you’re never coming back. Steffka and Tonio had been with me all morning until it was time to go. I was morose. I said goodbye and thought I would die. And if I didn’t die, I wouldn’t be quite a woman any more. When I suggested to the doctors that they shouldn’t take everything out – the ovaries, the womb, the lot – a kind nurse leaned over me. ‘Listen, darling,’ she said, ‘I’ve had all that stuff out and it’s bliss not having the . . . well, you know . . . those days once a month.’ I’d been bleeding all over the place, even on stage, and her words were a great consolation.

When I came to, I was in a foul mood. Steffi did her best to cheer me up and while she was there I was fine, but as soon as she left this great big black dog leaped out of the closet and gnawed at my entrails. I felt empty – as though I wasn’t a woman any more. I thought stupid thoughts like perhaps my Tone would go off me. He had a horror of hospitals, and when he came to see me he was tongue-tied and couldn’t wait to get out of the place. I would have to do some serious ‘pumping myself up’ if I wanted to get my equilibrium back. After all, what they’d taken out wasn’t anything I still had any use for . . .

Renee Wilson of Worldwide Films came to see me. She had always been a firm friend and proved it by ordering me to go and live in her house in Bexhill until I had fully recuperated. It was right by the sea, had a live-in maid and was ideal for convalescing. I didn’t need much persuading.

After a week at Bexhill I was determined to get back to the theatre. I thought it would prove a point, although I’m not sure I ever knew what that point was. Tonio tried to talk me out of it but realised at last that there would be no living with me unless I had my way. I phoned Bill at his office and told him I was ready to come back. I quite expected him to say that there was no point as there were only three and a half weeks of the tour remaining but he simply asked when I wanted to start. I told him I was ready to leap out of the wings immediately. He suggested I saw a performance to get back into the play and then took over on a Friday. With the weekend coming up it would give me a chance to rest. Steffanie was on holiday and came with me to look after me. She became my dresser, gofer, comforter, food provider and general ‘feel-good’ factor.

Going back to work was both a good idea and a bad one. Good because it stopped me worrying about myself: I was too exhausted most of the time. And bad because I was so weak and in pain. Between my entrances I lay down on a sleeping bag that Steffka put on the floor in the wings for me. At times I had to sit or lean on the furniture while I was on stage because I was so weak I couldn’t stand up unsupported for any length of time.

At last the tour finished and I was able to go to bed. I was in pain and popping pain-killers like Smarties. Every time I moved it felt as if the huge scar transversing my belly was about to rip open. The hospital told me the cause was the lesions, the aftermath of the operation, and advised me to exercise. Tone suggested I try golf. It would take me out into the fresh air, was difficult enough to make me forget my other problems – and would give him an instant partner when he felt like playing a round. He found me a wonderful golf pro, an ex-Ryder Cup player called Jimmy Adams and before long I was clouting the ball with maximum enthusiasm and minimum result, but the exercise was working. Each time I swung the club the lesions stretched a little more until the pain lessened. Jimmy suggested I play in some charity matches and introduced me to Garfield Morgan who played Chief Inspector Hoskins in The Sweeney. He was, and is, big stuff on the charity circuit and before long I was a regular as well.

My health was not our only worry. Matka had always run the house for us. It was her territory and we intruded on her routine at our peril. However, she was finding it increasingly painful to maintain her high standards. Her legs – the legs that had kept her mobile and on her feet during all the horrors of the camp and had carried us around Europe for nearly two years – were failing. She didn’t complain but I knew how much she resented the toll they were taking on her general health. She had once said that when she couldn’t walk any more it would be the end of her and now she was having trouble, especially with the stairs.

There was a small plot of land at the side of the house, so Tonio put in building plans to the council and dug the foundations. By the time planning permission was through the oversite was laid. It was only a matter of time before the walls were up, the roof on and the granny flat, with bathroom en suite, was ready for occupation. Mama loved it and it gave her a new lease of life.

While Tonio was building the flat, he enlarged the kitchen to make the huge farmhouse kitchen we’d always wanted. He also extended the terrace in the garden and built an Argentinian-style barbecue. Asados became our thing and at the drop of a sombrero we had a party and invited everyone we knew. Weather didn’t come into it. If it rained, we just handed out golf brollies and everyone got on with it and loved it.

While I had been sampling the high life of a provincial tour, Tonio had been setting up a touring company of our own: TRIP, which stood for Tonio, Robin and Ingrid Pitt. I wasn’t too sure that it was a prudent thing to do but Robin Ellis was back on the scene and liked the idea. We were to put on a new play by the Emmerdale Farm writer Neville Siggs. Called Duty Free, it was a country cottage farce. I played the much put-upon wife and Nick Tate from Space 1999 played the two-timing husband. Eunice Gayson of Bond fame and Tim Barratt, a veteran comedy actor, played the nosy neighbours. We opened in Bristol, went on to Brighton and a couple of other theatres before we took a week off, during which Tonio and I went to the Cairo Film Festival.

It was all a film festival should be: bags of dinner parties, flash cars and a need to impress the guests. The main British film entry was Euan Lloyd’s Wild Geese, starring Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris, Stewart Granger and Hardy Kruger. To promote it the Film Producers’ Association invited Susannah York, Judy Geeson, Georgina Hale and several others, including me, who had nothing to do with the film. On the opening night we were all supposed to be introduced on stage but the public address system was on the blink. The cinema was packed to the rafters with enthusiastic and very vocal Egyptians, who were making the most of the non-functioning mikes. One by one we girls tripped on to the platform, nodded timidly at the raging audience and hurriedly left the stage. Tonio had been roped in to do a public bow, although he hates that sort of thing. He was wearing a white dinner jacket à la Perón and entered holding his arms aloft in imitation of the South-American President. The audience went wild. We never found out who they thought Tonio was but when we left he had to have a police escort while we bimbos walked freely to the waiting cars without any interference.

The festival was due to go on for another week but I had to bow out. I was due back in England to tackle a new venue. When I told the press that I was leaving Cairo to open in a play in Cleethorpes the journalists wouldn’t believe me. I’m not sure I did either. It was a bit of a change: one day enjoying the exotica of the pharaohs – the next holed up in digs with the smell of boiling cabbage, Dettol and damp.

It was in Cleethorpes that I learned that I was about to become a published author. After Tonio had cut down my novel, Cuckoo Run, from 250,000 words to a more manageable 120,000, I had stuffed it under the bed. I had written the book merely to prove I could and didn’t feel like holding myself up to ridicule by trying to get it published. However, Tonio decided to get cleaners in to do the carpets, my manuscript resurfaced and he took it along to Futura without telling me. Just before curtain up he rang to tell me that Futura’s commissioning editor, Marjory Chapman, had phoned to say she wanted to publish Cuckoo Run. Amazed and thrilled, I slammed down the telephone, ran in the pouring rain along the pier to the dressing-rooms and told everybody that I was about to be a published author.