Just Me Read online

  We must protest, even – maybe especially – us oldies. Not just about pensions and the NHS, but on behalf of those who are 'not like us' – cocklers dying in our sea, and a lorryload of Chinese suffocating to death because of our ludicrously inefficient asylum system. Age is no excuse for opting out. When you are old, there is more free time to engage in a fight. At worst, it is something to pass the time if you are lonely. We can even protest online. A click with a mouse seems a poor substitute for marching to Aldermaston but perhaps more befits our years. But voices must be raised.

  The past in Budapest feels very recent. They prefer to forget the pain but the monuments are there if you look. There is a wonderful sculpture of a weeping willow, the leaves engraved with the names of the dead, on the site of one of the gates to the ghetto, paid for in part by the film star Tony Curtis, an American Hungarian Jew. I hope there will not come a time when that is removed like so many other memorials in the city.

  I identify with Budapest. Here is a place desperate to move on. Wanting to obliterate its past. But underneath there are unresolved questions; lurking fears and uncertainties. They haunt me too and fill me with melancholy.

  If life seems jolly rotten

  There's something you've forgotten

  And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.

  When you're feeling in the dumps

  Don't be silly chumps

  Just purse your lips and whistle – that's the thing.

  And . . . always look on the bright side of life . . .

  Always look on the light side of life . . .

  From 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life'

  by Eric Idle,

  from Monty Python's Life of Brian

  6

  Gatwick · Antibes · Africa

  I HAD TO GO to France to check on progress of the house sale. Having now faced my fear of flying budget airlines I deserted BA for the much cheaper easyJet to Marseilles. I regretted it when they announced that the plane was postponed for two hours.

  No reason was given for the delay, no one to ask, just wait and put up with it, in the lounge packed with furious adults and fractious children. I chose to pay £19 and wait in the special lounge where at least I could sit down. Not as swish as those of BA, but better than the seething ghastliness downstairs. After about half an hour, suddenly my flight was flashed up to depart in fifteen minutes from Gate 12. The friendly woman on the desk phoned to check this sudden change and yes, it was correct. I tore over, only to discover not a soul in the waiting area and the door locked. In desperation, I pushed the emergency button and it opened, setting off a loud alarm. I ran down to the plane, to be confronted by a startled captain and crew who, when they realised I wasn't a suicide bomber, told me they were going to Ireland, but I could join them if I wished.

  Returning to the holding area, I again pushed an alarm to get out. No one arrested, or even looked at, me as I emerged, klaxons blaring. I decided to try Gate 11, from where the plane had been previously planned to depart. Sweating and panicky, I rushed up to the girl on the desk, who was reading a magazine, and asked if I could go to the plane. It was some time before she tore her eyes away from the page, and looked at me with studied indifference. Eventually she sighed, 'It i'n't even 'ere yet.' I burbled out my story, and insisted that the information board said it was, and was she sure? Was I still at the wrong gate? Maybe it is because easyJet are not responsible for ground staff at Gatwick but she could not have been more uninterested. She could barely be bothered to mouth her monosyllabic replies, and looked at me with cold disdain. Eventually she ordered me to stand outside the door and wait. There was an empty lounge with seats beside her, but she drawled that it was 'against the rules' to wait in there or where I was standing. She insisted that I move ten feet away from her.

  This two-year-old, nasty piece of work, in her uniform, was thoroughly comfortable with the discomfort of a distraught old woman. Her look towards me was a mixture of malice and smirking superiority. She was enjoying herself. She continued to sit, relishing her authority to force a growing crowd of confused people, including screaming kids and fragile old folk, to wait in the corridor, merely shrugging if anyone asked what was going on.

  When her co-worker arrived, she laughed and joked with her, occasionally glancing at me to see if I was watching what fun she was having, and how little she cared about all of us standing hot and wretched in our queue. Never once did she break off her conversation to give us information or even to explain the misinformation. After about an hour, the phone rang, she tidied her desk, and without looking up summoned us in, with a languid reluctant flap of her hand.

  I seemed to be the only person in the docile queue that was hopping mad at our treatment. If others had backed me up we could have started a revolution and forced her to use her phone to get some information rather than having giggling conversations on it with her friends. Instead of which I ended up feeling like a troublemaker and the girl, unchallenged, would see no reason to behave differently in the future. Something in this girl's background, or psyche, or life experience, made her vindictive, which a little bit of power and a uniform had unleashed. In a small way, admittedly; Budapest, this was not. But she could not imagine the difficulties of the woman holding a tiny baby, whilst trying to stop a toddler running away. She was devoid of empathy. An actor like me is inclined to overdo the empathy because it is part of our job to put ourselves in other people's shoes, but I believe that lack of it is at the root of a hell of a lot of problems.

  Arriving in France, with all this whirling around my brain, as things tend to when you have no one with whom to talk it out of your system, I was struck by the difference in empathy levels. It was a bit late to start appreciating my way of life in France when I was planning to leave, and anyway all country people are more empathetic than townies, but in Apt, where I do my shopping, the streets are pristine, because people do not toss cigarette packets out of car windows or sling down their empty fast-food cartons – and not just because they don't eat much fast food. As for the dreaded mobile phone – in Apt I see scarcely anyone babbling mindlessly into one, oblivious to the irritation, or in my case apoplectic rage, of the trapped listeners forced to eavesdrop on their tedious lives. Are these babblers not aware of the world around them?

  Similarly the people at the airport, using their wheelie cases as mowers, or others whirling around knocking everyone flying with their rucksacks. They don't need to contain bombs, they have always been lethal weapons. The cyclists on pavements, the women barging their way through with battering prams, all have no sense of the space around them, or of the sensibility of the people within it. Lack of empathy. The same applies to the vomit and the urine in the streets of Liverpool and elsewhere that our fellow citizens inflict on the rest of us during their desperate weekend revelry. All of which rumination depressed me unutterably. Particularly the realisation that I am becoming the sort of dreary old fart who moans that it wasn't like this when I was a gal. But it wasn't.

  In Saignon I lay in the Phwah bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining John's usual, 'Yes all right, dear, calm down, calm down.' I tried to stop thinking of the brilliantly cutting things I should have said to the hapless airport employee. Yes, she was becoming hapless to me now. My empathy vibes were flowing again. Pretty soon my rage had ebbed and left me feeling guilty. After a sleepless night I felt old and tired as I arranged for a man to fell and trim some trees in the garden to neaten it up for prospective buyers. Next morning the dishwasher broke, forcing me to unload it and wash up using John's old Brillo pads and linen cloths. Beset by gloom, I decided to drive to Antibes and visit my sister.

  My sister Billie is a character. For a while, she worked in a charity shop in Oulton Broad and a report by the district manager described her as 'a lovely sprightly little lady with blue hair'. At the time, it was an effort to be sprightly, as she had recently lost her husband of fifty years, and was wretched at the thought of spending the rest of her life in the Broad
s: a bleak and watery place in which to end one's days alone. Especially someone with her history.

  So, she sold her house, put her agoraphobic cat in a basket, and they both moved to Antibes. She was seventy-nine. Her body is now bent forward, possibly aggravated by her propensity to race through life like a bulldozer, always leaving me and everyone else trailing a few yards behind her. She will chatter away at a rate of knots to anyone, including total strangers, her thoughts running ahead of her voice, so the sense is sometimes garbled. Malapropisms abound. She will tell you long stories about Gaby, Vicky, Zizi, Tom, Dick and Harry, forgetting that you have no idea who they are. The period of childhood during which I lived with her I spent in monk-like silence, because I couldn't get a word in edgeways. But I worshipped her.

  As a child she was small and chubby-cheeked, with beautiful nut-brown curls, whereas I was lanky and thin with mousy straight hair. She was vivacious, funny and talented. I was sullen, dull and studious. My huge feet didn't dance, but hers twinkled and twirled to the delight of all who beheld her. When we lived in a pub in Berkshire she went to dancing classes at the Italia Conti school in Holborn, travelling up in the guard's van, and met at the other end by a couple who thought she was so brilliant and adorable that they begged to adopt her. When she won a scholarship for full-time training at Conti's, my dad got a job in the Carpenter's Arms in King's Cross to be near the school. We both went to Ely Place Convent because they let her have the afternoons off to attend classes in tap, ballet, acrobatics, modern dance, singing and acting.

  Although we spent little time together when I was young, she is the only link that I have left to my childhood. Budapest had sent thoughts of the war whirling round my brain and I wondered whether, being seven years older than me, she would remember it more clearly and perhaps shed light on why it was that I still found it so disturbing. What happened to her during those years? And how did she feel about it?

  Her career was very different to mine though we both went on the stage. She went into what was called 'variety' and I opted for mainly 'straight acting' – the very names demonstrate which was the jollier option. Billie's stories are hilarious and always guaranteed to make me laugh but this time I wanted to discuss her wartime experiences. I knew she had been right in the thick of it – I could remember my parents' worry – and I wanted to know how badly it had affected her. On the face of it, it was a dreadful experience for a teenage girl. But not in Billie's version.

  It is difficult to keep her on track as her brain darts all over the place, but I did my best to cross-examine her. My repeated 'and how did you feel about that?' was laughed off or met with a blank stare. I had to glean for myself what this young girl might have gone through from the funny stories she told me.

  Her first job at the start of the war, when she was about fifteen, was in the pantomime Jack and Jill, put on by the impresario Jack Hylton at the Palace Theatre, produced in rather a hurry in an effort to keep his precious showgirls out of battledress. These languid lasses were reluctant to do much more on stage than pose sulkily, especially when they saw the tatty costumes, inherited from a touring panto, that they were expected to wear. In one number they donned pink taffeta short dresses, poke bonnets, white socks and patent shoes, rather disturbingly pretending to be children, singing Jack and Jill to sleep in a forest. Surely some confusion in plots here. Undaunted, they stood in showgirl poses, singing a ditty that went:

  Hush, hush do not make a noise,

  Lightly tread upon the air.

  All the little girls and boys,

  Make no sound.

  (Billie demonstrates the cloying harmony.)

  Ah, ah, ah, ah

  Ah, ah, ah, ah

  (Re-enacted by Billie, my sister and the rest of the chorus enter, fingers on lips, creeping on their toes.)

  Ah, ah, ah,

  Ah, ah, ah.

  Hush, Hush, Hush.

  Whereupon my sister and the rest of the young dancers broke into a spirited tap dance. At the dress rehearsal, Mr Hylton woke with a start in the stalls and, brandishing his whisky bottle, shouted, 'Jesus Christ, what's that? Get 'em off. The bleeding babes are meant to be sleeping.'

  There was little thought to protect youngsters in the theatre in those days and they were not well looked after. The showgirls were higher in the pecking order than the chorus, and would force Billie, being the youngest in the company, to break the rule and go out between shows to get buns from Maison Bertaux. If she refused, her head was pushed into the trough of water used to extinguish incendiary bombs. Our union Equity would have something to say about that nowadays but Billie seemed quite sanguine about it. 'That's how it was.'

  She had no rest during the show as the chorus dressing room was miles from the stage so they were forced to sit on benches in the wings, waiting for their next entrance, and had to use the time to knit for the troops.

  Conditions were pretty vile in the theatre in London during the war. Rats from the bombed sewers roamed the theatre, and audiences prepared to brave the air raids were sparse. The fifteen-year-old Billie learnt to dodge the bombs and told me horrific stories as though they were nothing special. On one occasion, they heard that a bomb had fallen in the Pall Mall area. One of the girls' parents had a pub in an alley there. After the show, Billie accompanied her to see what had happened. The pub was completely destroyed by a bomb. The two girls rushed around London trying to locate her family. The parents were in a rest centre, but they found her brother's mutilated body in a temporary morgue. Yet they were back next day, giving it their all at the Palace Theatre.

  The whole company showed great resilience. Billie roared with laughter as she told me about a rather camp chorus boy in the show who was sitting on a lavatory, with his trousers down, when a bomb sliced the house and left him, stranded, revealed to the world. Valiantly rescued by a butch fireman on a ladder, he was devastated that his hair was such a mess.

  She appeared in a couple of other shows before gradually the theatres in London closed down, unable to compete with Mr Hitler's firework display. So Billie volunteered for ENSA. The initials stood for Entertainments National Service Association but were more commonly interpreted as Every Night Something Awful.

  The headquarters were based at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where people were teamed up and formed into acts and shows. Billie was paired with her kooky friend Bobby Pett, into what was known as a 'sister act'. They joined the cacophony of rehearsals, grabbing any space they could backstage, in the bars, or the stalls, to create a performance. When I was doing the band call of Sweeney Todd in the same dress-circle bar and heard for the first time the huge orchestra playing the magnificent score of Sondheim's music, I couldn't help thinking of my sister and Bobby, working out their dance steps, as they hummed a melody, and clapped out the beat.

  The two girls first of all toured all over England, and were then told to congregate at Drury Lane for an overseas assignment. They were taken to Liverpool, where they boarded the Andes, a luxury-liner-turned-troopship, crowded with hundreds of men, two nurses and them. They were much sought after, particularly after they gave a performance of their new act, which involved stripping off different layers of costume until they were left in very snazzy corsets. The nurses felt considerably disadvantaged in their uniforms.

  During the long time at sea, my sister complained to the captain that the man steering the boat wasn't very good, as they were zigzagging all over the place. It was only when they arrived that he explained they had been dodging U-boats, the German submarines. When she went up the gangplank at Freetown, my sixteen-year-old sister was confronted with, in her words 'my first sight of a man's willy and it was black'. They were helped on shore by semi-naked black residents.

  After several performances in Freetown, they embarked on an odyssey, on which they were the first white women to set foot in certain areas of east, west, north, south and central Africa, covering as much ground as any redoubtable Victorian woman explorer. They travelled by small plane,
train, but mostly in an open jeep, through the bush to remote camps. They wore masks over their faces with the eyes cut out to protect them from the red dust, frightening the natives to death. Their lavatory was the side of the jeep, with a sergeant keeping watch for curious villagers, snakes and wild animals. The first place they slept in was a mud hut where they hung their washed undies up on a string line that a thief hooked out of an open window; they had to sew up the front of some men's pants to wear. The bush radio soon spread the story, so they would be greeted by 'Oh, you're the girls with no knickers.'

  Their attempts to give the women-hungry troops something pretty to look at were slightly marred by Bobby being violently carsick, and often being carried off the jeep comatose, and both of them being bright yellow from the anti-malaria drugs. They learnt to rig up a shower with a tin can and string, and to make up in the jeep wing mirrors. Then they leapt on to the platform composed of oilcans and planks to perform their seductive numbers. The arm gestures were altered to wage a constant battle with greasepaint-loving mosquitoes. One night, in the languorously sophisticated song, 'I'm Blasé', Bobby frantically walloped at a swarm of flying insects with her long cigarette holder, and disappeared down the back of the stage. A couple of soldiers hoisted her back, replaced her bent cigarette in the holder, and she continued undaunted.

  They suffered from sandfly fever, malaria, dysentery, and the wonderful Bobby eventually died very young from TB, which Billie is convinced started during their months in Africa. On one occasion, an army doctor gave Billie an overdose of smallpox vaccination and she contracted a mild case of the disease – she bears the scars to this day. The rest of the company had to continue and left her for a month in quarantine, in a hut guarded by an army private. Another time, they gave a lift to an airman going to Accra, and the day after they arrived had to have a series of painful injections in their stomachs, as he had developed bubonic plague. No wonder, considering many nights were spent throwing things at large rats approaching their beds.