Chapter
One - Sailors, Nuns, Orphans and the Planet Jupiter
Today I was asked why I should want to write my autobiography. The tutor asked this question at the first meeting of the Autobiography Class for the Worthing University of the Third Age. I can't remember exactly what I replied at the time but what I thought was 'Well, that's easy, it's because I want people to know what happened to me'. 'Yes, but' a little voice inside me asked 'why do you want them to?' 'All right, all right' I answered to the irritating little voice 'it's because, like the words of the Fred Astaire song, 'I want to leave my footprints in the sands of time'.
I want to feel that there is some purpose in my having lived, or at least, perhaps something to prove I have lived. When I visit anywhere famous, I always want a photograph taken of myself nearby, to show that I have been there. At least nowadays we have photographs which record our physical features, but when we read Gray's Elegy at school, I agreed very strongly with the poet that it is very sad that so many 'mute inglorious Cromwells' lived out their obscure lives, leaving for posterity only decaying gravestones in lonely churchyards. It's not just that they had little opportunity of making their mark on the world, it's the fact that future generations would not ever be aware of the joys, sorrows and hopes, and also the lessons they learned, however mundane, which must have mattered so much during their lifespans.
I am most inglorious but not at all mute, although in my early years after I emerged red and apparently rather ugly into the world of the Bellevue Nursing Home in Durban, South Africa, I was very timid and self-conscious. This was possibly due to the fact I was born under the astrological sign of Cancer and Cancerian children are noted for being shy and over-sensitive. I was the first and as it subsequently turned out, the only child of doting parents, my mother particularly having been desperate to have a child and very fearful that she might not, after a rather late marriage on the rebound to my father. I was not however nearly as self-conscious as my poor Auntie Kathleen (also by the way a Cancerian) who would not ring the bell on the bus in case people looked at her and had to proceed further along the bus route until someone else needed to get off!
My mother was an unusual woman who had many friends from all walks of life, including mystics, arty types and homosexuals in the days when these were not considered acceptable, and she also included among her friends Olivia, who had married a Russian Jewish millionaire, who was in films. On one occasion he wanted me to walk across a lawn holding a child's parasol as part of a cinema commercial. I was absolutely terrified and refused point blank to do such a thing. Yet the strange thing is that about four years later, in my first dancing review at the Durban City Hall, I discovered the lure of the footlights, and from then on was desperate to - at various stages of my life - sing with a band like Doris Day did in certain films, star in a Broadway musical or be a child star in Hollywood like Margaret O'Brien, who was six months to the day older than me. I was still very lacking in confidence off stage, and very nervous of the ghastly stage mothers who pushed their children forward at the Dancing School. Rather like the aforesaid Auntie Kathleen, I used to hover outside the studio waiting until someone else opened the door so that I could get in behind him or her without being noticed. However, when the first show in which I took part opened with, appropriately, 'There's No Business like Show Business' with the chorus of children all dressed in gold satin with sequins doing step together, step kick, and the huge Durban Civic Orchestra playing the lead in to the song and the gold lights dazzling our eyes, I felt something so wonderful that it must have been almost as powerful as a spiritual conversion might be to someone else. I thought 'This is what I want', I felt confident, and I smiled dazzlingly like we had been taught to, and being in a large chorus, did not then suffer from the agonising stage fright which later, on getting small speaking parts in amateur shows, made me realise how unsuitable for a proper stage career I would have been.
Often, autobiographies start with one's earliest memories, and I can only remember a few incidents in the years before I turned five. One was of my very young Zulu nursemaid throwing my ball out of the garden into the street, presumably with understandable spite and resentment against a privileged white child. She was very young herself, probably only about 13, and a little later she gave birth to a bonny fatherless baby called 'Julius Caesar Kunene' thereby proving that the poor South African educational system for the blacks, called 'Natives' at that time, did not fail her entirely! She subsequently ran away and we never heard from her again. Another early memory is of my parents explaining to a builder that they wanted the veranda wall of our fifth floor flat made higher to protect me from falling. I was about four and thought how stupid they were to worry. I thought 'do they think I want to fall off the balcony?'
There was a lift in the block of flats, the old kind with open bars that you could see through. I heard that someone had been stuck in it and asked my mother anxiously about it. She said 'it wouldn't matter, someone would mend it and get you out. And you wouldn't die; someone would give you bread and water'. About a week later my new Zulu Nanny, my beloved Nanny Maria and I were alone in the lift having been out to buy a loaf of bread and the lift stuck half way between floors. I became frantic and tore at the bread with my fingers to Maria's astonishment and when a lady from one of the flats came out on to the passage, I asked her desperately for some water. She passed a glass through the bars and must have wondered at my urgency. It shows that children have very literal minds. I had been told (I thought) that the only reason I would not die was because I would be given bread and water!
But the memory of which I am proudest as it shows some sort of philosophical awareness, was that I was lying on my back on the lawn at the rear of the block of flats where we lived, with Nanny Maria, who was working at some crochet beside me. I watched the huge cumulus clouds slowly moving across the deep blue sky and I thought 'those clouds will move across the sky and keep moving and I will get older and older and the sky will still be there with different clouds passing even when I become very old'. I know that this happened when I was still four, as I spent my fifth birthday in Johannesburg, some time after leaving that block of flats with the lawn at the back.
Other things from the early years, I may only remember because I was told
about them.
Apparently, during the war, when the British soldiers and sailors going round
presumably to North Africa stopped at Durban, people were very hospitable and
often invited them to dinner at their homes. I was about 4 and playing on the
swings, while my nanny sat nearby, when 2 young English sailors spoke to me.
Apparently I asked them to dinner the following night, as I had heard my
parents do in the past, and told them my address which my parents had made me
learn in case I ever got lost. The next night when the doorbell rang, my mother
said to my father 'Who on earth can that be' and I said 'Oh, it must be those
sailors'. You can imagine the shriek 'What sailors?' and the awful
embarrassment of my parents who had not bought any extra food or drink suitable
for entertaining. I am sure it was very strongly stressed that I must never do
this again. .
At the end of 1941 we moved to Johannesburg as my father was called up to join the army, and he had to go there to train. My mother anyway was a very nervous person and extremely protective of her precious child and she had this notion that as Durban was a port, Germans might come and shoot at us as we lived near the beachfront, whereas Johannesburg was inland. So she took me up ahead of my father to stay in awful little lodgings until he could join us. However, he worked in the Civil Service, in Native Affairs, and when one of his colleagues broke his leg, they said my father could not be spared and someone had to remain to man the department so his plans were cancelled and we had to return to Durban in 1943. However, this time we stayed about a half hour's walk away from the beachfront and were therefore slightly more remote from the marauding Germans, or maybe Japanese. If you look on a map, you can see it really would have been a long way for the enemy to come, but South Africa took the war very seriously. One heard later that some of the Nationalist Party members had sided with the Nazis but I lived in Durban, where English was the main first language and some English South Africans seemed to look down on the Afrikaners as much as they in turn felt themselves vastly superior to the blacks!
Once, when we were staying in Kensington, a suburb of Johannesburg in the house of my Uncle Bryan, my mother got worried that my Zulu Nanny Maria would not have enough Kruschen Salts left, some sort of medicine which my mother used to buy for her. So my mother sent her a postal order with what she thought was a clear instruction to buy herself some more when she needed it. Maria's written English must have been a bit shaky because although she did go out and buy another large glass jar of the stuff, she thought my mother wanted it sent to her. It obviously did not occur to her that my mother would just have bought some for herself in Johannesburg had this been the case.
Anyway Maria put the address as 9 Highland Road Kensington and the large heavy jar was sent from Durban to Kensington in London where some enterprising postal person wrote "Try Johannesburg, South Africa" on it. Unbelievably, the jar arrived at the house in Highland Road unbroken. And people complain about the flaws in the English postal system!
From the age of six, when we returned to Durban, I can naturally remember many more things. My mother wanted to be freed from domesticity so that she could meet her friends and join various occult and literary groups, and so we moved into a boarding house. My father did not seem to mind (I think) and from then on until I was about 20, we only lived in boarding houses, call them hotels if you want to be pretentious, which the management were, and did! They were unlicensed, and many single people lived in them as permanent residents. Also of course people would stay in them for a few months whilst looking for more permanent accommodation. It was rather like living in the Terence Rattigan world of the play 'Separate Tables'. It was very unusual for a child to live permanently in this way, so I became the 'hotel child' rather like the 'ship's cat'. I was not regarded as a lucky mascot though. Many of the elderly residents probably disliked me as I failed to greet them politely when passing them in a passage. I often walked around in a dream world of my own and so did not see them.
I knew more about the war than many South African children of my age, because of living this communal life, I suppose. There were posters up in the Reception area saying 'Don't talk about Ships and Shipping' and other dire warnings. I wondered and wondered about this. I didn't know anything about ships and shipping and wondered what one mustn't say and whom one shouldn't say it to! They even operated a few blackout practices in South Africa too and appointed wardens to shout 'Lights out!' but I think this was mainly in Johannesburg.
My parents were keen filmgoers and as we lived in central Durban where all the cinemas were clustered, we went every Saturday night to the early show so that I would get to bed soon after 9 pm. I saw all the British and American Movietone Newsreels every week although of course I found the War news boring and was much more interested in the cartoons and the 'big picture' as it was called.
For most of the year it was rather a lonely life for me, as other children appeared only at holiday times when they came down from inland places for their annual escape to the sea, at Christmas or in what was called the July Holidays. Occasionally another child would stay for a longer period and this was very exciting for me. One such girl was the neglected daughter of a heavy drinker who was not often seen downstairs although presumably she paid for their board and lodging. Lauretta, the daughter only seemed to have one dress. She and I were both only about nine years old and perhaps she wasn't mature enough to find her own clean clothes. There was a lot of gossip about the mother and residents wanted to club together to buy Lauretta another dress. I don't think that this ever actually happened however. Perhaps the mother's binge ended.
Anyway the thing I remember most about Lauretta was that we made up a language together and turned an exercise book into a dictionary. The language was predictably called Beryllaurettaese and in that odd way that many people store totally useless information whilst forgetting the really important things, I can still remember one sentence of the language which went as follows "Abookil jowk marmbeban eetapookali frilialiali" which meant "I hope you are well". This was the phrase at that time with which we nine year olds began every letter we wrote.
The weather is wonderful in Durban in July; it is the winter and is rather like a really pleasant English summer all the time. People did go on holiday at Christmas but the heat was unbearable in Durban until about March, and we used to go on our annual holiday in December to Johannesburg where most of my mother's family lived. I saw my cousins there but they didn't like me very much as I was an outsider and stranger. Once when I was coming round a corner to play with them in the garden, I heard one say 'Well, after all, she is our cousin so we ought to be nice to her'. Thus they demonstrated that they were a very Christianly lot in every way. Apart from our little branch of the family, everyone was very religious. My Uncle Brian used to walk around with a banner with various warnings for sinners, on the Town Hall Steps, and their whole family used to go to church twice on Sunday, and when we visited the old Great Aunts in Johannesburg, we all had to kneel for Family Prayers every evening.
My father was a rather indifferent Catholic and did not fit into all this very well. My mother was a dabbler in all matters spiritual, and had been a Catholic at one time, and most of her friends were 'into' Rosicrucianism, the Brotherhood of Light, Buddhism etc etc. I think she knelt while the family prayed too, but I am not sure as my eyes were always obediently closed. She loved her family but would not be coerced into being as they were. She threw away all the religious tracts, which used to be included with every letter or birthday card received from any of them. My granny must have been a bit embarrassed in front of her sisters about her wayward daughter, but there was still a great sense of family between them all. My granny always used to go on holiday with us to Johannesburg to see her sisters and stay with them whilst we stayed in a much lovelier hotel than our usual Durban residence. My father thought it was strange that 4 elderly sisters could live in the same house and all attend different churches on Sunday. It would have seemed more companionable to go together. One was a Methodist, one a Baptist, one Church of England and one possibly Congregational. They all had their own special cups to drink out of at home and it was extremely important that they kept to this rule, I thought this was rather eccentric at the time.
My father had started off with three brothers but his younger brother Lindsay died shortly before I was born. I have the idea stuck in my mind that he died eating a watermelon in a contest, but I think this seems far-fetched. I suppose two stories got confused in my mind, he probably did eat a watermelon, he may even have won the contest, but surely he did not die this way! My Uncle Bert was my favourite; he used to throw money out the train window on to the platform for me when he left Durban after a holiday. Nobody liked his German wife, Auntie Marie, who my mother said looked like an egg accident! She was very heavy and boring I suppose. My father's eldest brother, Uncle Jack, talked a lot and very quickly, almost with a stutter, and mainly about his medical problems and his operations. He and Auntie Isabel had two dogs who used to bound up to us on the beach on a Sunday and scatter sand on to our tea and cakes, which used to be delivered by Indian waiters who never seemed to forget where on the sand their customers were.
Sometimes on a Sunday evening, this Aunt and Uncle used to attempt to visit us. My parents both found my Uncle Jack extremely boring, I suppose because of his medical bulletins, so often if they saw the couple approaching or heard their car parking at the gate, we would hide in my parents's hotel room in the dark and keep very quiet when they knocked, and eventually they would give up and go away! I did not really understand why but was very worried I would cough or sneeze. It's amazing what children accept as a normal way to behave!
My father's religious problem was having two half-sisters who had taken the veil; one being a Mother Superior made it worse. This connection was especially awkward when my mother refused to allow me to go to Catechism lessons at the Convent I attended as she felt the Catholic teachings at that time were too frightening for a child. She said I could attend the rival Scripture class if necessary. The head of the convent said this was impossible and that a Catholic child must attend catechism, or leave the convent. When my mother refused, the priest was sent round to the boarding house, called Linwood Villa, to make my father take action. He muttered something about it all being up to her, and behaved in what must have been considered a very ineffectual manner. My mother remained adamant, and I was therefore expelled from the convent at 9 years old. I was very proud of this and thought it made me quite special. The only person I had ever known to be expelled was a girl call June Husbands who they said was light-fingered, a strange expression that I did not understand for quite a while.
And so I left the convent in the middle of a year and had to start at a new school. This was called a 'government school' which meant you did not pay, and so it was not as posh. Because my mother was afraid of sending me to a school near us which might have been 'rougher' as they say, she chose Park View School which was in a suburb of Durban and might have a better catchment area. She was not actually correct about this but was doing her best. Changing schools in mid term could have been an awful experience for me, especially as I was rather timid with other children. However, I was extremely lucky. For some reason, the girls in my class were excited about having a new girl. A very popular confident girl called Yvonne Bates, took my arm and raced me round the playground shouting 'Hey, look, new girl' and introduced me to everyone and as she was one of the in-crowd, I had no problems. This was the very opposite of my life in High School which was later to be I think my most miserable time ever, and it often amazes me when people say that your school days are the happiest days of your life. I would say 'God help life', if that were true!
I have read so many books about children who felt deprived or were deprived and their early struggles and feelings of inadequacy. I was the opposite in that I believed us to be quite well off. In actual fact, we were very average. My father was a careful civil servant who had begun work at 13, and had worked his way up in the Native Affairs because he could speak Zulu fluently. We were modestly comfortable and he was a frugal man. Living in a boarding house at that time was actually a cheap way to live, and because black labour was so cheap, it was not the luxury it would be today. Linwood Villa was what my parents called a 'dump' anyway, the food was inferior, it was too near the Docks and many undesirables stayed there at different times. We never had a car and we lived so centrally that bus fares were not expensive.
I do not suppose many people have personally known two people who later became tramps, but I did. One was Geoffrey Minton, who was filthy even when still living in Linwood Villa. His shirt collars were grey, his hair was wild and he carried around a battered manuscript, which was his PLAY. He talked all the time about being famous and was always trying to read his precious composition to other residents. He had a crush on a pretty girl called Ngaire who he called 'The Little Fairy' and was always asking her to go with him to the Willowtree Milk Bar for a Knickerbocker Glory. She found him absolutely revolting of course, and always refused! Eventually he became a familiar grubby figure wandering the streets of Durban, still clutching his filthy battered manuscript.
Then there was Ray Lessing, who drank too much. He sat at our table in the dining room at one time. So did Leigh, a pretty girl. Long before they got together, I looked at them across the table and said 'When you two have children, they will look like both of you as you two look so alike'. I can still remember my mother's embarrassment saying 'Beryl, they aren't married', which of course in those days meant to most people that you could not possibly have a child anyway. Later, however, romance blossomed and they did get married and left Linwood Villa. But within 7 years, he was a down and out, asking people for money in the street, and I don't know what happened to poor Leigh. There was also a strange blowsy woman who wore celanese dresses (whatever happened to celanese fabric?) and apparently took some sort of drugs and was carried out screaming in the night, much to my delight as I leaned out of my bedroom window to watch the commotion.
But the resident with whom I was most involved was Mr Wood, a sprightly elderly gentleman who used to stand at the front gate of the hotel, watching all the people walking by. I liked standing there and talking to him, and my parents said 'You must only stand at the gate after dark if Mr Wood is there'. He never actually touched me, but he said to one of the holiday children 'Next time you go to the toilet, tell me and I will go with you'. This she repeated to me, but I never thought of telling my parents. Later, her mother complained that he had molested her daughter and when I heard this being discussed, I mentioned what I knew. They asked why on earth I had not told them this before. The Management was informed and Mr Wood was watched from then on. He apparently started bringing little girls home that he had met at the park, presumably rather neglected children, and one day they found he was locked in his room with two of them. There was great excitement and the Police were called and I never saw him again. It seems I would probably have been safer standing in the dark by the gate on my own. But on the other hand, my mother was quite a fearsome person and perhaps he would not have dared to molest her precious child!
Coming back to the subject of our financial status, as I said, we were in an extremely average financial position, but due to circumstances, I thought we were well off. It's all comparative is it not? When I went to the Government School, there was an orphanage in the catchment area and there were in fact a lot of very poor children at the school. They did not have the proper school uniform and wore shiny gymslips over any sort of blouse they could find; sometimes it was a floral dress cut short. I admired the poor ones tremendously, they were so confident, they were not over-protected as I was, they walked to school on their own and did not have grannies waiting for them after school to take them across roads. They were cheeky and pushy and seemed to me to be very happy.
Had I been at an exclusive school, my whole attitude would have been different. As it is, deep down, I still feel that the really poor who ultimately succeed, are more admirable than people who have it too easily are. When as a 13 year old in my final year at Junior School (the educational system was different in South Africa then) I saw the film of 'Annie Get your Gun', it had the most incredible effect on me. I became very strange, cried all the time when I wasn't at the cinema, lost all interest in other films and only wanted to know about Annie Oakley or the dynamic Betty Hutton who played the part so amazingly in the film. Betty Hutton had grown up without a father in the slums and had sung in the street for money, and then become famous later. Annie Oakley too was a poor backwoods girl who eventually rose to fame and success.
I explained to my parents that I did not have a hope of fame or fortune, as they looked after me so well, and I had clothes and went to school and they would not let me sing in the street for money. They were kind but despairing. 'But we can't let you sing in the street here, its too dangerous, what can we do?' they pleaded. They took me to cafes for treats, and did their best to cheer me up, but it must have all been very worrying for them. Other less tolerant parents might have given me 'something to cry about' as they say! They were being blamed for what I considered to be my inevitable failure in the future, which really goes to show that parents can't win! This strange stage went on for months. I was obsessed with Annie Oakley, I sang all the songs, dressed up as her and even got on the front page of the Durban Sunday Times after winning first prize in a Fancy Dress contest. The younger children at school used to run after me in the playground and beg me to sing 'You Can't get a Man with a Gun'. Someone even wrote a poem about me in the class. I remember it ended 'On Sunday she borrowed her father's gun and shot her brains out just for fun'. My best friend Valerie was a bit jealous and tried to hurry me away from the following of my young fans.
After almost a year I saw the 'Great Caruso' and this improved my state of mind a bit, and I went through my Italian phase; I tried to learn Italian from the book 'Teach Yourself Italian', went potty over Mario Lanza, bought his records, and my daydreams were then about being his friend. By then I had forgotten my dreams of being a friend of Margaret O'Brien. Mario Lanza and of course Caruso had also both grown up in poor homes and had ended victorious and successful. I loved the Latin motto of the City of Durban 'Debile principium melior fortuna sequitur' which I suppose more or less translates as 'from little acorns you get large oaks'. The Italian Opera phase also made me become very interested in La Boheme, again about poor cold students living in garrets. I struggled through a translation of the book 'Scenes de la vie Boheme' on which the opera is based and it all seemed very exciting and romantic. I certainly learned how unromantic poverty actually was, when later struggling in squalid London bedsitters.
But throughout my childhood this admiration of poverty, orphans and poorer people was always with me. Even before I saw 'Annie get your Gun' when I still played with dolls, I did not play the same way that other children did. Most of the time I was on my own anyway, and I had several dolls of different sizes. Dolls were about the only thing one could keep in a hotel bedroom. I obviously could not have large toys or bicycles to play with. I used to mix up my dolls' clothes so they all looked poorly dressed and wore unmatching tops and bottoms. I copied the orphans at school and put floral blouses under their gymslips (actually I had beautiful clothes for the dolls, copies of many of the things I wore, including my dancing school black practice tunic). When I played, I pretended I was the mother of the dolls who called me by my first name and they all loved me, even though they were so deprived! I found it very difficult to play with other children who wanted to brag about how lovely their dolls looked. They would say things like 'Now Priscilla is going to a party and she's putting on her best pink dress with her frilly pants to match and she looks really pretty'. Then of course I had to join in and dress my dolls properly too.
I saw another illustration of the comparative nature of how one views one's economic status when later in London we knew a boy whose mother worked at Selfridges in the Food Store. Very kindly, this shop would occasionally pay for the child of a staff member to attend a public boarding school if this helped their employee. As Eileen was a lone parent, she was very grateful. In fact this privileged education seemed to ruin his life. He felt envious of the other boys with their holidays abroad, their luxury presents on their birthdays and fashionable clothes. He wanted the good things of life and did not seem able to understand why he could not have them straight away like all the others.
Later he became a criminal. He began by taking shirts off people's washlines and graduated to stealing cars, which ended in a spell in Lewes Prison. Now he is drug addict and I fear a lot more besides. Maybe if he had been just another latchkey child living in a North London slum, he might have been a bit wild at first, but would have settled down as most young tearaways do in the end. Every child seems to want most of all to fit in with his or her contemporaries.
When I was little and my mother was studying astrology, she used to tell me that I had 'Jupiter in the Eighth House' (astrologically speaking) and would therefore always be lucky with 'other people's money'. this has certainly been true. Some people think that this is wonderful and I am so lucky. However, I really would have preferred to have been lucky in my own right, for instance by being famous or successful as an actress, singer, writer, artist, anything! But this was not to be.
My luck through other people began early. I was 8 years old, sitting on the Durban beach on a Sunday morning with my parents. Every Sunday this was the ritual. We walked down to the beach from the hotel and sat on deck chairs or on towels on the sand, in the blazing sun and then walked back in time for Sunday dinner. People were not then aware of the dangers of skin cancer as they are now. One day, a lady of about 28 was sitting near us on the crowded beach. I was drawing with a stick on some of the smooth damp sand having scraped away the top layer of the hot loose golden sand. She started to talk to me about what I was drawing and seemed very interested in me.
She spoke to my parents as well and asked where we lived. My mother, who was always a bit of a social snob, seemed to approve of her as she spoke well and was obviously well educated. Nowadays, people are more suspicious of strangers I think and would not be so frank about themselves in these circumstances. Anyway she must have taken note of our address as on my birthday the next July, she turned up with a wonderful doll for me in a huge box with wonderful sets of clothes, raincoats, jerseys, bathing suit, everything! She of course did not know about my peculiar attitude to doll-dressing. Anyway, I was very pleased with this present, as it gave me a greater choice of items to mismatch! In the next few years, she gave me gold necklaces and other lovely presents, and invited me to her niece's birthday party in Durban North, which was considered very posh then. The food was wonderful and we all played in the extensive gardens and of course these children had dolls' houses, bicycles and pet dogs, and all the things that children with lots of living space can have. It turned out eventually that this lady called, Mickey Miller, had emotional problems and her doctor had advised her to take an interest in someone else whom she could help, and she had chosen me! Lucky for me, I suppose!
This friendship lasted about 4 years, until later she became engaged and got married and although I was still friendly with her, and even as an early teenager used to phone her occasionally, I began to get the feeling I might be a bit of an embarrassment to her as it reminded her of her neurotic past, and so the friendship faded.
When I was much older in London, I had another what one might call 'fairy godmother' but that's a later story. And even further into the future there was the kindness of my English father-in-law.