Just Me Read online

  Many times I have been tempted into dreary, worthy plays for the prestige they carry. The London critics rave, the people who read their reviews nod approval and laugh that special humourless 'haw haw' that says they understand an intellectual nuance, whilst secretly longing for the show to end, so they can get to supper, where they will pretend they adored it to their friends, and thankfully cross it off their list of things they ought to see. What I really love is hearing an audience genuinely roaring with laughter. Mind you, it is quite satisfying to make them sniffle too. I have been so helped by Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams, Eddie Izzard, Richard Pryor, Catherine Tate's old lady, Ray Cooney, Mel Brooks, Alan Ayckbourn and countless other mirth makers when times have been tough. Laughter is important. It is a genuine healer of the sad soul.

  I remember the moment when I made the decision to use humour to get by. At grammar school we were asked to design a town. I was a diligent student and spent hours on the project, working out a Utopian existence for my inhabitants. There was a factory for employment, medical care, schools, art gallery, playing spaces, and a theatre, of course. And cows.

  Miss Lewin showed my plan to the whole class, pointing a derisory finger at my field of cows in the centre of town. I had thought this through carefully; their milk would provide instant nourishment for all the children, who in those days had a little bottle a day at school. It would be fresh and warm, straight from my cows, which was one of my good memories of being evacuated, but the teacher had the whole class howling with laughter at the thought of these urban cattle. I was deeply hurt and not a little angry. A sulky, temperamental outburst was imminent, but hearing their amusement, I decided it was probably more fun than respect, and a better option was to abandon umbrage and go for the laugh. And that has usually been my choice ever since.

  We came to London with the play, and its success continued. I don't have the courage to read reviews, but apparently mine were all wonderful. Matthew gave me a photo of my name in lights and I was pleased to see myself up there in action. On my own. Never mind that the newspapers used the same old sentimental guff about sad Sheila trying to forget her loss. People were paying to see me in a play, not just a widow of a man they loved. They wouldn't pay good money and sit through two hours of theatre for that. It did my ego no end of good.

  The publicity interviews I most enjoyed were with Jonathan Ross and Paul O'Grady. No pseudo, cliché-ridden, brave-widow bullshit from them. Marvellous, disrespectful stuff. Their sharp-witted, slightly dangerous, public personae conceal two sweet pussycats who love their families and friends. I like them a lot. They made me feel attractive with their compliments.

  Not that I watched the programmes to see if they were right. I never look at anything I have done and, whatever people say, I am convinced I look ugly. Sad really, that when I come across early photos of myself I am surprised how presentable I was when I was agonising over a funny nose and pointy chin.

  One programme in 2005 I had to watch as I was dubbing the narration, a poem to mark the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day. My voiceover was interspersed with people's memories of VE Day and the war. I was moved to tears by one story of a man who lived, I think, in Clapham, where there had been a devastating bomb that killed many people, including children. Several days after, a German airman bailed out and landed near the bombsite. A wrathful crowd set upon him and he was killed. The man, a working-class Londoner, still visits the airman's grave every year with a bunch of flowers.

  The terrible thing was that I understood the crowd's rage. I felt it as a child when friends, and fathers of friends, were killed, and bombs rained down on my home. That is not something I like admitting. I would prefer to be forgiving like that gentle man. To decide, as a little boy with his bunch of flowers, to defy the mob mentality, was so courageous. He did not care that he was reviled by his neighbours. Actors I'm afraid like to be loved. It is our job after all. In Grumpy Old Women I let rip at some pretty soft targets. Even with them, I worry lest I offend. Or hurt. When I did Room 101, where you consign to oblivion things you dislike, egged on by Paul Merton, I obliterated Chiswick Post Office, complaining about the uncommunicative counter staff. When it went out, I was distraught with guilt. For all I knew, the monosyllabic woman, grunting behind her reinforced glass, was stricken with grief over the death of her mother. Or maybe they cannot be held responsible for their catatonic state, having all been sent into a hypnotic trance by the constant repetition of 'cashier number one, please'? No, I don't have the courage of my condemnations.

  When The Anniversary came to an end, the company were all sad. It is a recurring feature of theatre and film life, that you become close to colleagues, the show ends, and you all go your separate ways. It can feel very bleak. All the razzamatazz stops suddenly on Saturday night, you pack up your make-up, and clear your dressing room ready for a new inhabitant, and that's it. Very often you face unemployment. Convinced that you will never work again. Certainly on the following Monday night, if like me you are on your own, come the time when you would be getting ready for the show and you remember hearing the audience chatting in anticipation on the tannoy, it can feel very lonely.

  The Anniversary had bolstered my self-respect, given me confidence. Now, here I was in no woman's land, trapped between the past and the future, teetering on the edge of something unknown. I had been busy, busy, busy filling the chasm left by the acceptance of John's absence. For me work was an effective panacea. But hovering on the edge of my conciousness was another Quaker quote, one I had chosen to ignore: 'Attend to what love requires of you which may not be great busyness.'

  If I should go before the rest of you,

  Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone,

  Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice,

  But be the usual selves that I have known.

  Weep if you must,

  Parting is hell,

  But life goes on,

  So sing as well.

  'If I Should Go before the Rest of You'

  by Joyce Grenfell

  3

  Ramsgate · Herne Bay · Puglia

  WHEN YOU ARE IN the doldrums, people usually recommend a holiday. Even doctors. 'You need a change of scene,' they say. Well, the curtain was beginning to fall on France. That was a step in the right direction. If you have a second home abroad, you feel duty-bound to use it. So you go there, rather than exploring other holiday possibilities. But now – 'the world is your oyster' as my dad used to say. Although then, never having seen an oyster, I didn't know what it meant. Now, having seen and indeed eaten one, I still don't. Unless it is the possibility that you might find a pearl. Which would mean eating a lot of oysters. Or taking a lot of holidays.

  That was not an idea for which I could rouse much enthusiasm. Especially on my own. I have never been very good at holidays anyway. It was not part of my conditioning. My parents didn't teach me leisure. I never remember them going out or having friends round. Indeed, I don't remember them ever being idle. If my mother sat down for a rest, her fingers would be clacking away with the knitting needles. If my dad listened to the wireless he would be cleaning the cutlery or polishing shoes with his special dusters and brushes. Busy, busy, busy.

  The curse of the Protestant work ethic sits heavily on my shoulders. I feel guilty reading a book, unless it is research for something. (I blame my childhood – that's what I always do when I can't explain things any other way – my children have started to do it about me, so it seems only fair. Ellie Jane, when shouting at her errant daughter: 'God, Mum, I sound like you.') My grandma would find me jobs about the house, muttering, 'The devil finds work for idle hands.' She didn't consider reading a library book a proper thing to do. That is probably why the only books in the house were my granddad's Harms-worth's encyclopaedias, the Bible, and 10,000 Answers to Your Children's Questions, which didn't seem to have any of the questions I wanted answered. The Bible was better on sex, if a bit confused.

  We went on only two holidays when I was a
child. The first was to Ramsgate before the war. In retrospect it was not a joyful event but at the time I thought it was. Being turned out of the bed-and-breakfast lodging, after sad kippers, or congealed scrambled egg on soggy toast come rain or shine, seemed reasonable. When it pelted down, you traipsed round Wool-worth's or sat in a shelter on the promenade and watched the rain drifting over the sea and played I Spy with Mum and Dad. I spy something beginning with G. Grey? Yes. But the cafés, with their fish, or egg, and chips, were the Caprice to a kid from King's Cross. The funfair was exciting, too. I learnt to love speed on the motorbike roundabout, squealing with ecstasy.

  I was less enchanted by the dodgems, on which I shared a car with a friend of my father whose hand seemed to hold me in odd places. More groping happened when I was too shy to refuse to squash up to him in a carriage in the aptly named Big Dipper. Quite a lot of my holiday was spent avoiding being alone with this gross man. I can't pretend his wandering hands, or what he led mine to grasp, or what he showed me, scarred me for life. He was the first in a list of what I would come to call Dirty Old Men that merely slightly soiled my, and on comparing notes, most of my girlfriends', lives. We dealt with it by laughing, and by probably being quite cruel: 'Don't think much of that chipolata, mate.' No, no great harm was done, I just remember not liking it very much. Nothing was said. He was Daddy's friend and paedophilia was unknown to that six-year-old child. Probably to my father too. All in all, not a happy holiday memory.

  Less disconcerting is my recollection of the only other childhood vacation we had, in Herne Bay after the war. The English idea of recreation was still a spartan affair; at least for the lower classes. The country was a gloomy place in 1946, with rationing still in operation, and gaping holes left by the bombing, and fathers who didn't return from the war. We were not a stylish nation, with our utility furniture, and the few clothes we could get with clothing coupons augmented by home-made frocks, made on Singer sewing machines, from Butterick patterns, or, in my case, adapted from my sister Billie's wardrobe. I blush at the memory of a bathing costume, knitted by my mum, which floated away from my body in the water and sagged to my knees when I got out.

  Herne Bay seafront was not Cannes, but it had some rather pretty beach huts, one of which Daddy hired, so we could shelter from the unrelenting rain. There must have been some sunny days then, but I don't remember them. Even if there had been there was not much action with buckets and spades, because the beach consisted of unforgiving pebbles, unless the tide was right out, leaving a bit of hard sand. There was a tiny boy in the next beach hut, with a quiff of hair forming a question-mark – we christened him Nipper, after a popular strip cartoon – who could sprint over the stones to paddle in the sea. Dad would stagger after him, yelping and grimacing, falling on his knees and crawling, an elaborate daily pantomime that had me, Nipper and the other kids bellowing with laughter. Twelve-year-old girls were still children in those distant days, and sharing a holiday with parents who had little time in their six-day working week to frolic with their offspring was joyous. Nowadays, girls would probably prefer to go off to Ibiza with their mates but I wanted no more than to laugh with, and at, my dad.

  When I had a family of my own, regrettably I didn't do annual holidays with them. Actors don't have set holidays – just periods out of work. Anyway it wasn't part of my lifestyle; a foible much resented by my now-grown-up daughters, who take regular holidays with their children. When they complain about this I remind them of one holiday we did go on, to Tenby. The usual rain that drenched me in England followed me to Wales, lashing at the hotel windows. In desperation, I stripped them to their costumes, figuring that they were going to get wet anyway, and made them play on the deserted muddy beach and swim in the sea, narrowly avoiding being struck by lightning. It was by mutual agreement that we came home early.

  John had a similar virtually holiday-free childhood, so had the same indifference or, in his case, aversion, to the concept. He felt safer at home, which is why France was perfect for him; it was abroad but home as well. He liked the familiar. He had a habit on holiday of making the first chair he sat on his nesting place. We went to Oman together, and, it being Ramadan, the super-deluxe Al Bustan hotel was empty, so we were upgraded to a luxurious suite, full of reclining couches, vast beds and sumptuous armchairs. When we arrived after the long journey, John sank on to a hard chair by the front door to have a fag, and that became his haven. It took several days for me to prise him off it, and several more to get him outside to the glorious beach, and it wasn't until the last day that I forced him into the desert to visit some bedouins that I had met. And of course he found it fascinating. But the holidays were an ordeal for him, and therefore for me, trying to keep him happy.

  We did have two blissful holidays after he found sobriety, one in Paris and the other in Venice. I loved both places, but now, contemplating this oyster world that had presented itself, they were both no-go areas. Too many memories. Must move on. Must move on.

  So, holidays were not top of my wish list – unlike the young man I saw on television in one of the holiday programmes I had started to watch, who was thrilled to be paying his way as a rep because he could 'make a lot of money, get pissed every night, and shag a lot of birds'. On the historic island of Rhodes. I wasn't tempted to book.

  Then two things happened to point me a way forward. I watched a reality programme on TV about families swapping places with each other on holiday. I am not a fan of this new genre generally, but sometimes the programmes can throw up truths about us and the society we live in. One family was middle-class, confident and used to holidays abroad. The other was dominated by a fat clumsy, woman, with two downtrodden daughters, and a monosyllabic, defeated partner, whom she bullied into staying at home for holidays, with the odd trip to, I think, Weston-super-Mare. Even there, she was astonished, when she was persuaded to take a coach trip, that it had more to offer than she had dared to seek. To begin with I was infuriated by her insistence that everyone bow to her will, and her total ignorance of the world outside her rigid confines. Then the other family began to give her daughters ideas, and the husbands too had stilted talks behind her back. Her world began to fall apart. Her grief was awful to watch. Her fear and loss of identity when she was forced to go to Thailand – the other family's choice of holiday – was desperately sad. She tried to cling to her old suffocating values, so obviously a product of her childhood; in the end her liberated family was lost to her, vowing to take more trips, have more fun, but she yielded only a little.

  The walls we erect around ourselves, with bricks made of fear, are well nigh impenetrable. Cowering behind them, we become prejudiced, ignorant and inert. I recognised myself, and certainly John, in aspects of this woman. It takes a supreme effort to breach those barricades of your conditioning. That John became what he was, did what he did, was an achievement to be much more proud of than he was. To move through the various stages of life takes courage. And determination.

  My inability to move forward manifested itself one morning, when I woke with my eyes glued shut by an eye infection and no voice. My body trying to tell me something? All a bit New Agey – but I think so. Then an email handed me a straw to clutch, from the most unlikely source: the Daily Mail. Not, I have to say, my favourite dispenser of distortion to the masses. Although, at the end of a bitter battle with the paper, I had ended up liking the editor Paul Dacre better than I did at the beginning. And if you are up to your neck, it's pretty stupid to reject a hand proffered to keep your head above water.

  The travel section had asked me to write a piece for them. I wasn't a journalist, and certainly not renowned for my travelling, so why I don't know. But why not? It was a godsent opportunity to take a holiday under the guise of work, a chance to kick-start myself into enjoyment, without the obligatory guilt. I was offered a week in a luxury spa somewhere hot, or a cruise, with my family or a friend. Whatever I liked. I could hand-pick my oyster, which would definitely contain a pearl. All this was too cush
y for my conscience. So I chose to write about holidaying on my own.

  The letters I had received had brought home the problems this could present; and not only because lone travellers are penalised for their solitude with single supplements and silly rules. British Airways cabin staff, because they are not insured, are not allowed to help you put your luggage in the overhead lockers – not easy if you are old, or not very tall, and have no one to help you, unless someone offers, which nowadays they seldom do. Entering a hotel dining room by yourself can be a challenge after a lifetime with a partner to keep you company. It's difficult to make friends because overtures, especially from men travelling alone, may be suspiciously rejected. So, although a cushy mini break with a friend would have been more pleasant, I decided, as is my wont, to choose the hard way.

  A trip to Apulia or Puglia in Italy was suggested as a destination. I had to look it up on the map. It is the heel of the Italian boot. Interestingly enough for me, it encompassed Foggia, where my first husband, Alec Ross, was stationed for a time, in the RAF during the war. His stories were chiefly of confusion and mistakes. The Italian campaign does seem to encapsulate the chaos of war, as well as the extraordinary self-sacrifice of the men taking part. It is difficult to understand the early devotion of the Italians to Mussolini. OK, so he built towns and roads and made the trains run on time, but couldn't they see what a strutting, ludicrous figure he cut in his bizarre uniforms? By the time Alec arrived, they had realised their mistake, strung him up from a lamppost, and joined the Allies against the Germans. The army, covered by Alec and his comrades in the RAF, worked their way up the leg of Italy, culminating in a bemused Alec and a fellow, lowly airman being ushered to the royal box when they attended the opera in Rome, and receiving the salutation of the audience.