A Moment Towards the End of the Play'

An Autobiography

Timothy West

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780010878
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Known - and loved - for his many TV appearances in Brass and as the embodiment of Edward VII, Thomas Beecham and Winston Churchill, Timothy West has led a charmed life as an actor, moving effortlessly between TV and stage, film and radio recordings. With his wife, Prunella Scales, and his son, Samuel, he and his family have been responsible for much of the best that stage and screen have had to offer in recent years.

'A theatrical memoir that doesn't cloy, and is filled with insight, wit and a sense of the ultimate absurdity of life' (Judith Flanders, TLS )

Chapter One

My father carefully slid the new wireless from its corrugated-cardboard packing, and setting it on the table, tentatively twirled the needle through the display of exotic names on the panel – Hilversum, Droitwich, Schenectady. As the valves began to glow and the faint odour of warm bakelite invaded the room, my father drew out the instruction manual and settled down for a good read.

I believe the greatest pleasure he derived from any new acquisition was to be able to muse at length over the Directions for Use. Faced with even a relatively simple artefact like a tin of sardines, he would switch on the standard lamp, take the tin to his favourite armchair, put on his glasses – perhaps light up a pipe – and devote himself to a careful study of what was printed on the side of the tin. Whereas my mother, dismissive of conventional guidance, would attack the article with kitchen scissors or a screwdriver, or simply hurl the tin round the room until olive oil and small particles of sardine began to leak out over the floor.

I therefore inherited on the one hand a fear of doing something the wrong way; and on the other, an unwillingness to be told how to do it right.

We listened to that wireless set every evening, sitting together, Ovaltineys in the firelight, letting our imagination wander across the boundless geography of radio drama. A rare period of family stability, after a hitherto nomadic and rackety childhood.

My parents, the actors (Harry) Lockwood West and Olive Carleton-Crowe, met in 1927 on a tour of The Ghost Train. Theirs was a theatrical existence that was shared by many at the time, but would be quite impossible today. They were not West End actors – my father was not to begin appearing in Central London for another twenty years – but they were constantly in work, together or separately, on tour or in regional repertory; appreciated by their audiences and respected by their colleagues, working sometimes for very reputable and sometimes for less than reputable managements. They lived in theatrical digs when on tour, and in rented accommodation during a repertory season. Financially they just about kept their heads above water, but even had it been practicable to put down roots in any one place, they would have found it impossible to advance money on somewhere permanent to live.

They married, and in due course I was born, whilst my father was playing in a short season at the Prince’s Theatre Bradford. This has entitled me to call myself a Yorkshireman; but though for various reasons I maintain close links with the county, it should be acknowledged that had I been born three weeks later, it would have been in Eastbourne. A month after that, and the company had moved on to Blackburn.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have no clear memory of living anywhere until in 1939, when I was four, we alighted briefly on a small house in Argyle Road, Ealing, round the corner from (and I suspect financed by) my paternal grandparents.

In those days the massive Stoll Theatre chain had Hippodromes, Empires and Lyceums all over outer London, and producing managements could tour a play for a week at Shepherd’s Bush, a week at Chiswick, a week at Streatham Hill and so on, knowing that audiences clung to their local theatre and there was no danger of trying to catch the same people in two different places. My father had secured a part in one such play, and had the luxury of being, for a whole six months, able to commute to every single theatre from Ealing, on his shining new Raleigh bicycle.

My sister Patricia was born in May, and amid the first rumblings of global hostilities it was decided that my mother should take the two of us down to the West Country on a short holiday, my father should negotiate for a resident job in repertory in Bristol, where he knew the management, and we should join him when he’d sorted out some accommodation. As it turned out, this took rather a long time. We had already just begun to outstay our welcome at Manor Farm, Bishopsteignton, Devon, when war was declared; and shortly afterwards, to our not altogether delighted surprise, a bus pulled up in the village and disgorged twenty of the very same children I had been with at nursery school in Ealing.

The baffled-looking evacuees, labelled and clutching their gas masks, were moved into line and briskly led away down the road to their assigned billets. My mother, concealed behind a tree, looked on aghast. Here were we, living off the fat of the land – the farm’s unlimited supply of cream, eggs, butter, fresh pork sausages – while my schoolmates would have to be content with whatever sustenance the rigours of rationing and the parsimony of their reluctant new guardians allowed. The social situation would be insupportable. Hastily we packed our bags and made the diplomatic move into a vacant set of dingy rooms in the main street of the village.

Weeks passed, and still my father had been unable to arrange for us to join him. I loathed our changed surroundings, and particularly resented being separated from our farmer’s father-in-law, who owned the family transport company. This consisted of a fleet of four buses that ran a service into the nearby town of Teignmouth. I was friendly with three of the four drivers, though Mr Banham, a cantankerous elderly man who drove the most decrepid of the vehicles and was consigned to the less popular service to Newton Abbot, justifiably thought me a bloody nuisance.

The bus garage was next door to the farm, and I had been able to go round there to check each arrival and departure. Our horrible new quarters were too far away to do that. I therefore got very cross, and one morning I nearly killed my baby sister.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually mean to kill her. We’ve had our ups and downs like any brother and sister, but actually I’m very fond of her, and it was more in a melancholy spirit of scientific research that I released the brake on her perambulator while my mother was inside a shop, and sent it hurtling down a steep hill. Somebody ran across the street and stopped it just before it got to the crossroads, but it must have been a near thing. My sister rather enjoyed it. I think.

Eventually we did get to Bristol, and the unpacking of the new wireless inaugurated an unprecedented period of six whole years under the same roof, in a semi-basement flat in Clarendon Road, Redland.

As time went on and Churchill felt unable to promise us anything other than blood, toil, tears and sweat, the Government decreed that all able-bodied men of my father’s age who were not in reserved occupations must join either the armed forces, the fire service or the police. So Lockwood West, the leading man of the resident company at the Little Theatre Bristol, became PC46, ‘C’ Division of the Bristol Constabulary.

He adapted with ease to his new life; the comradeship of the police force was not unlike that of a theatre company, and the discipline hardly arduous to one who was used to Weekly Rep – performing eight times a week, learning an act of the next play each night when he got home, and rehearsing it the following morning. Of course there were physical dangers; it was part of a policeman’s duty to stand guard over unexploded bombs, and there were plenty of those in Bristol. But quite a lot of his time was occupied in organising, scripting, directing and acting in the various morale-boosting shows which the police provided as entertainment for the wartime public.

With another constable who became his unofficial stage manager, he would roam the streets in search of blackout infringements, and while he frightened the offending householder with a description of the dire penalties the law was bound to exact, his companion would cast an appraising eye over the house and grounds in search of possible props for their next production.

Finally, ‘That’s a very nice see-saw you have in your back garden, sir. If you could see your way to transporting it up to the Victoria Rooms in time for our Christmas Pantomime, we’ll forget this little matter. No, sir, thank you, mustn’t drink on duty – well, perhaps a cup of tea ...’

I used to worry what would happen if on night duty he was ever called upon to engage in physical conflict with a wrongdoer. In those days, a policeman’s only weapon was a wooden truncheon, kept concealed in a special long pocket in his trousers. But it was my father’s habit to bring home little gifts of hard-to-come-by articles which might have been specially designed for the truncheon pocket – outsize candles, bicycle pumps, bottles of HP Sauce – so that there was no longer room for the actual truncheon, which had to be abandoned in his locker at Lower Redland Road Police Station.

His weekly salary of £3.10s. was hardly enough to support a wife and two children and pay the rent on our flat, but fortunately he was able to supplement this with the occasional Schools Broadcast – the BBC having moved that department down to Bristol soon after the outbreak of war. The WPC switchboard operator at Lower Redland Road, who had been a regular patron at the Little Theatre and to whom my father was still a romantic figure, acted as his agent (we had no telephone at home). While he was out on the beat, the light would flash on the police phone box at the corner of the street, and he would answer it:

‘46 reporting.’

‘Hello, Harry. Jenny here. I’ve got a Senior English for you. 2.30 tomorrow afternoon, go straight down after early turn, I managed to get them up to two guineas.’

During his rounds that morning, he might stop and buy Jenny a bunch of flowers in lieu of the conventional 10%, and hope they might survive in his truncheon pocket until he got back to the station.

 

*

 

I privately think this may have been the happiest period of my father’s life. Not, though, of my mother’s. Having finally given up the stage herself only a year or two earlier when my sister was born, and I believe missing it still; trying to fit in with her husband’s eccentric work and sleep pattern – one week of duty from six in the morning to two in the afternoon, the next from two to ten at night and the third all night from ten till six in the morning – and at the same time look after two young children, cope with rationing and dodge the air raids – it began seriously to get her down.

Of course, as children will, I felt personally responsible but at the same time too embarrassed to try and comfort her, and so while at home I kept myself very much to myself.

We should have realised the enormous amount we had to be grateful for. Many of our friends had fathers fighting abroad, some had elder brothers flying those Hurricanes and Spitfires we could see above us, sometimes engaging before our eyes in dogfights with Heinkels and Messerschmitts. A lot of them didn’t come home.

Bristol of course was terribly badly bombed; I remember waking up and finding the bedroom ceiling suffused with a bright pink glow – it looked exactly like the effect of a beautiful sunrise. It was only when I got out of bed and drew the curtains, thinking it was time to get up, that I realised it was two o’clock in the morning, and the whole of old Bristol City was on fire. The sky, though, was not like the colour of any known fire – it was an unearthly hideous pale pink, thick with choking smoke.

Marshal Goering settled into a pattern of Sunday night raids on Bristol – there were two prime targets, the aircraft factories at Filton, and Avonmouth Docks. Incendiaries, however, fell pretty well anywhere, with a few in the adjoining roads to us, and we could hear the loud explosions as we huddled in the cupboard under the stairs. Here we sit like birds in the wilderness, birds in the wilderness, birds in the wilderness we used to sing in our pyjamas, munching ginger biscuits and enjoying the adventure.

Of course I had friends; not many, but a few very close ones. Peter Davey and his sister Melody lived two doors away; and when I was about eight and Melody a year or so younger, she and I were taken into the underground air-raid shelter on Redland Green by a slightly older boy called Stuart Hodder, who, having lit a candle, explained to us by means of biological diagram the mysteries of procreation.

I didn’t think too much about it, though I noticed Melody was a bit silent on the way home, but that evening there was a knock at the front door and I admitted a very serious-looking Mrs Davey who quietly asked to be left alone with my mother for a few minutes. She had in her hand the draft of a letter she intended to send to Stuart Hodder’s parents, and such was her estimation of the gravity of her visit that she had specially donned a white hat and gloves for the thirty-yard journey from her house.

When she grew up Melody became a very good professional contralto, and then, surprisingly, a nun; but I don’t think that had anything to do with Stuart Hodder. Her brother and I are still close friends after fifty-something years, and share a passionate interest in public transport.

The Headmistress of Westbury Park Primary School, where I was a pupil, was Miss Torrens, a broadly built, tweed-clad woman with a bristling black moustache. I was terrified of her. However with her deputy, the delicate, soft-spoken Miss Heath, I was deeply in love. When she was appointed Akela to the local Wolf Cub pack, I joined like a shot, but I never made much of a success of it. New younger boys rose through the ranks of Seconds, Sixers, Senior Sixers, and passed on to the Scouts, while I remained the oldest, largest and most completely undecorated member of the pack. I could light a fire, I could read a map, but beyond that I was useless.

I was pretty useless at school, too. I went from Westbury Park to the preparatory department of Bristol Grammar School, an establishment reluctantly attended and later entertainingly chronicled by the writer Peter Nichols. Actually the main school was in the care of a very estimable man called John Garrett, but I never got that far, and my quarrel was with Mr Pitt, the head of the prep school.

Mr Pitt, I’m afraid, liked caning people; and what I, as a frequent recipient of his attentions, found peculiarly distasteful was the time he always took to do it. Having announced that he would deliver six strokes, and having given the first, WHACK, he would apparently lose interest for a few moments, perhaps winding his watch or changing the date on his desk calendar, before returning to the fray, WHACK.

Then he would stroll over to the window and look out over the playing fields. ‘Going to be nice weather for the House Matches, I think,’ he would remark pleasantly, WHACK. Conversation might then turn to the play he had seen at the Little that week (it had now been considered safe to dismiss the War Reserve Police, and father was back at the acting). ‘I enjoyed George and Margaret’, Mr Pitt would go on, a smile that he supposed to be good-natured playing for a moment on his cadaverous features, WHACK, ‘and thought your father was very good. Very nice suit he had,’ he would add thoughtfully, WHACK. Then he would prepare to light his pipe, scrabbling around in his oilskin tobacco pouch, breaking several matches and finally getting the thing lit, bup bup bup WHACK.

‘Well, I think that’ll do. Thank you.’

Things couldn’t go on like that. I didn’t complain to my parents, because it didn’t occur to me that there was anything out of the ordinary in his behaviour. I had read Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Stalky and Co, Tales of a Three-Guinea Watch and Nicholas Nickleby, and I suppose I just thought that was what School was supposed to be like. I had had no preparation from my parents, both of whom left school very early, and, when questioned, didn’t seem to remember much about it. So I just took the law into my own hands, and played truant.

Every morning I would set off on my bicycle in the direction of school, but then turn off to spend the day pedalling through the leafy lanes of Abbot’s Leigh, or, in darker mood, venture down to Christmas Steps, a narrow Dickensian alleyway that climbed steeply up from the Tramway Centre and was held to be a notorious focus for sin and depravity. I used to hang about on the steps for hours, looking very sophisticated, but, apart from seeing a copy of the Naturist magazine Health and Efficiency displayed in a newsagent’s window, I remained disappointingly uncorrupted.

Sometimes I would go to watch the ships unloading timber at Cumberland Basin, or peer through the handsome Georgian windows of Royal York Crescent and see delicate examples of Chinese pottery, highly coloured draperies from Jamaica, huge plaster Madonnas from Spain or Portugal; for here were to be found the remnants of a once huge cosmopolitan community, the most affluent of whom, in the great but partly disgraceful days of Bristol’s maritime supremacy, would come up the hill from Hotwells to breathe the purer air of patrician Clifton.

On these illicit jaunts I used to imagine how it would feel to be in the company of the great men of Bristol’s past. I rehearsed conversations with W.G.Grace as he went in to bat, with John Cabot on board the Matthew bound for Canada, with Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing with his hat and cigar in front of those massive chains. Turning homeward in order to arrive at a convincing time, I felt no guilt about my truancy; it seemed to me my education was better served in this way than by my regular encounters with Mr Pitt.

Of course I was expelled.

About the same time, another pupil was expelled, from the same class, and for the same offence; a flaxen-haired boy named Glover, whom I only knew by sight. Very many years later, when I was having a drink in the bar of the Arts Theatre, my eye was attracted by a tall man with very fair hair, cut in that same pudding-basin style. I had known the actor Julian Glover just well enough to say hello, but now that he had his hair bleached and cropped for his part as the Knight in John Osborne’s Luther, things clicked into place. I went over to him.

‘Glover, Lower 2B, Bristol Grammar School?’

‘Good God, yes. Wasn’t it terrible?’ We’ve been firm friends ever since.

Chapter Two

The Rapier Players, the repertory company at the Little Theatre Bristol, was run for twenty-eight years by the indefatigable husband-and-wife team Ronald Russell and Peggy Ann Wood. As unofficial mother and father to the closely knit community toiling away in the cramped building adjacent to the Colston Hall, Peggy Ann and Ronnie provided all the love, security and instruction that they would have ...