Life Before Stratford

The Memoirs of Amelia Hall

Amelia Hall, Diane Mew, Diane Mew

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 1990
• ISBN:
  9781459714458
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

By the time Amelia Hall died suddenly in December 1984 she had become one of Canada's most respected and well-loved actresses. In this book she has left an incomparable record of her early years in the professional theatre in Canada. In particular, these memoirs chronicle the history of the Canadian Repertory Theatre of Ottawa, one of the first professional repertory theatres in Canada. Under Amelia Hall's direction in the late forties and early fifties, the CRT gave a start to the careers of such notable Canadian actors as Christopher Plummer, Eric House, William Hutt, Ted Follows and William Shatner.

In these days of long-running corporate subsidized extravaganzas, it is instructive to read of the struggles and accomplishments of these pioneers of theatre in Canada, performing weekly repertory on a shoestring budget, with few facilities adn minuscule salaries. Yet it was these enthusiasts who provided the basis for the flowering of the Canadian theatrical scene in the 1960s and 1970s. It is appropriate that these memoirs should culminate in Amelia Hall's portrayal of the Lady Anne in Richard III opposite Alec Guinness at the first Stratford Festival in 1953, making her the first Canadian and the first woman to speak on the Stratford stage.

This book is lavishly illustrated with photographs from Amelia Hall's personal collection, now housed at the National Archives of Canada.

PART ONE
CLARA BAKER’S PUPIL
1916–1939

CHAPTER 1

TRANSATLANTIC CHILDHOOD

My father, Arthur Hall, was a Yorkshireman who had emigrated to Canada as a young man. His sweetheart, Elizabeth Metcalfe, followed him to the new world in 1912, and they were married in Toronto in April, the day after she arrived in Canada. Two years later, in 1914, they returned to England for a visit, just as the First World War broke out. There was no thought now of returning to Canada, and my father enlisted in the 16th West Yorkshire Regiment. Not long after I was born, in 1916, and just six weeks after he landed in France, he was reported missing, presumed killed. His name is on a memorial in that part of France, at Thiepuel, among those of eighty thousand men who were missing in that bloody section in February 1917. My father was just twenty-seven. Of these events I have no actual memory, yet they are ever-present in my childhood.

I have heard people say that they do not remember their childhood. I remember mine as if I were already an octogenarian. I always have. I remember a child who walked head down over the moors of Yorkshire, who was mesmerized by the green of grass, who thought that tiny English daisies grew especially for her, who first noticed the sky while lying under an apple tree in blossom in a public park, and who saw in the sky the embodiment of freedom and space. Nothing was so personal and mysterious as the bluebell woods then, multitudes of bluebells that, once picked, lost heart and died. Never could they be persuaded to live in a jam jar.

Joy of woods and skies and field! Joy of singing when the sun returned in the morning! Joy of singing before a journey, be it by train, or by charabanc, or on one’s feet! The people I observed from a perambulator: ladies side-saddle on their mounts; a lorry parked, and shelves lifted out... and the sudden hush ... a soldier on each shelf.

Night and the call downstairs, “Goodnight, mamma!” “Goodnight: go to sleep.” Close my eyes and think my Big Thought, “Where does the sky end?” But I cannot think this thought. I cannot think end. I feel dizzy in the attempt. I seek safety under the sheet.

Morning always new. Blue-ringed cups at breakfast, and maybe a visitor. Hospitality! Wriggling while fitted for clothes. A canary sits on my head.

Shock of the silent house when we return home after Christmas, from a house where there were men. We stand about and do not speak. The fire to build. Woman and child alone.

We crossed the Atlantic on the S.S. Minnesota in April 1921, when I was five. I hailed the voyage with joy, thinking it would be a day-long sailing venture from a seaside town. I sat on a piece of luggage and sang what I thought appropriate Songs for a Journey. When in mid-Atlantic I realized what an enormous event was taking place in our lives, the solemnity of this occasion made tumult within me, and I wept. “What if my dada comes back from France, and we aren’t there to meet him?”

I did not speak of this again.

In Canada we had taken a frame cottage in the east end of Hamilton, Ontario, and this cottage had an outside toilet, at the bottom of the garden, with two holes. This toilet I considered the house’s outstanding feature. But we were not in this house very long. We began to travel and eventually returned to England. We had been in North America about a year.

Back in England there was a housing shortage. We stayed for a while with relatives, and one young couple who harboured us had a little row house temporarily, on one of the streets from which no speck of green could be seen, unless it was a blade of grass struggling to appear between the cobblestones. In this brick-and-cobblestone district, in the industrial North, the toilets were down the street, a sort of Ladies and Gents shared by a number of these “town houses,” as we might call them today in the inflationary seventies in Toronto. I did not question this arrangement any more than a child questions an outside toilet on the farm or at an old summer cottage. The house was clean, the furnishings were comfortable, and there was an atmosphere of good humour and love there.

The truly happy part of my childhood was spent in England. Everything that has mattered to me started there. It was in this shabby district, in the local school, that I learned to read. I was seven years old then, and because I could neither read nor write, I had begged to be sent to school. I had seen Toronto and Hamilton in Ontario, and Palmira in New York, and Chicago, and Fargo in North Dakota, but I could not spell any word that had more than three letters. In the crowded classroom of that council school in Leeds, the teacher taught me painlessly in six weeks to read. Then we moved away. She came one Saturday to pick me up at my new home, to take me to her home to tea. After we arrived at her rooms, she left me in the sitting-room, before the pleasant fire, while she went upstairs to change. When she reappeared, this dark-haired lady was in a red velvet gown, and there was a fine tortoise-shell comb in her hair. I was honoured. After tea we played paper and pencil games, sitting in a huge chair. Lovely lady whose name I cannot remember, who gave me the reading skill, and a social occasion!

In my second school I was placed with five-year-olds because I had been in my first school only six weeks. A visit from my mother, demanding of the headmistress that I be allowed to display my reading skill, resulted in a promotion. That brief session is the only time in my life I have ever felt physically a giant. I was an object of great curiosity there because of my enormous size!

The third school was an Anglican church school, on Green Lane, as good as in the country, and it was bliss. The teacher was a lively mother of three called Mrs Norman, with a robust sense of humour. If the classroom became dull, which was seldom, one’s imagination could take to the ancient road outside, where Roundheads and Royalists came riding. I was skeptical of the reality of fairies even in those days, but I knew that the Past existed, still.

There was a lad in class who on occasion would be asked to entertain with a monologue, and these monologues, simple and amusing, I would go home and recite, fully memorized, to my mother. But these joyous days did not last. I was promoted to a higher grade mid-term, where I was terrified of the male teacher ever asking me a question, since I understood nothing of the work they were doing.

The fourth of my English council schools was a fine institution in Roundhay, a district of Leeds, and here the boys and girls were in separate schools. One day I came from class with the news that our teacher, Miss Mather, had asked the girls which of us was the best actress in the play we had done, and after various performers had been nominated she had said, “I think Millie was the best.“ What role had I been playing, mother wanted to know, and would I recite it for her? I explained that I couldn’t recite the role, since I had had nothing to say. The play was The Pied Piper ofHamlin Town, and I was part of the crowd. A wise woman, Miss Mather, whether Millie was best or not!

We seemed to spend a great deal of time on literature in that class, and I learned many poems, long and short. I used to go home and recite them, and mother applauded, because she would have found it agony herself to have stood up in class to be heard. Her delight was contagious, and it was good to know that she was pleased.

My mother was devoted to the theatre. The first live performers I ever saw and admired were amateurs. These were a group of Pierrots who performed at our church, in a little side room. It was a mission church in Leeds, for though mother was raised in the Anglican church, I had been christened Methodist. Some of the Pierrots were my relatives. The costume was of white satin, with black pompoms down the blouse and on the conical hat. The Pierrots sang, had ridiculous conversations, and were outrageously comic. I loved them. At the English seaside, where we often holidayed both in and out of season during my seventh to ninth years, we saw professional Pierrots on the piers, and Punch and Judy on the sands, and better still, we attended the music hall. Here there were comics in spectacularly mismatched jackets and trousers, with their broad music hall technique; and there were ladies in splendid gay-nineties gowns, ostrich feathers in their hair, singing popular songs and walking grandly the length and breadth of the proscenium, embracing the house with big gestures and brassy warmth. This, I felt, was something that would be most satisfying to do when one grew up.

But when I was eight there was a greater delight still: a play. This was a thriller called, I think, Interference. Someone has committed a murder, and the leading character, a doctor, has discovered the body; thinking the crime to have been committed by someone he loves, he has determined to cover up for the culprit by destroying any incriminating evidence. He proceeds to rearrange the props in the room. This pantomimic scene lasts about ten minutes. We begin observing the doctor with relaxed interest, anticipating his every move. We know how his mind is working. Suddenly his next move is not what we had expected. All right, he is not going about the business in the order that we would have taken, but what of that? But just a minute, can it be that he doesn’t realize that on the table is that bit of evidence that just has to be removed? Alas, can it possibly be that it is not the doctor who is careless but the actor who has forgotten? Oh, if we only knew!

He is checking the whole room; now he will surely notice. No! He has turned to leave the room! Ought we to call out to him, and warn him? If it is the actor who has forgotten, then it is our duty to help. But if it is the doctor who has forgotten, then will we spoil the plot if we tell him? Such an agonizing dilemma! He is at the door! Oh, he has paused. He looks back once more. He “cases” the room, sees the mcruninating little article on the table, swoops down upon it, and is gone. The house sighs and laughs in relief. And I have had my first lesson in theatrical suspense.

When I was nine we left for Canada once more for a second try, and all these delights were left behind us. Again we went to Hamilton, and I was not happy at school.

My mother began her twelve-year stint at Allan’s, where they made men’s shirts amid an insane clatter of sewing machines that I preferred not to remember between my rare visits there, where Miss Webber was the forewoman. Often mother worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and I think she was glad of the overtime money. Sometimes she brought work home with her, because it was piece-work, and you got paid for how much work you did. A sensible arrangement. My aunt looked after me, until a couple of years later, when she returned to England with her husband. Often when mother got home it was 8 o’clock and I was off to bed. We seemed to be growing apart. I did not read books, and I was constantly nagging to escape to the movies.

My mother started to take me to the Grand Theatre to see any companies that came to Hamilton. Matheson Lang, Sir John Martin Harvey and his wife, and one or two others came on occasion; mother went to everything and took me most of the time. Sometimes I was bored, as I was with Matheson Lang in The Chinese Bungalow. But at any rate I was there. We always sat in the gods at the Grand. Les Enfants du Paradis. The seats were not chairs but narrow wooden benches, with high wooden backs, torture to sit on for long. One learned to turn this way and that, favouring now this cheek and now the other.

It was about this time that my mother decided to encourage the talent I had shown in England, and my lessons in elocution commenced with Vere Blandford Rigby. I was ten years old. I don’t know how mother afforded lessons for me, but I was never told on any occasion that there was any necessity we could not afford. I practised my elocution for an hour every day, though I often had to drive myself to do it. Because of my joy in singing and because of my strong diaphragm, Mrs Rigby thought I might eventually become a singer. Very shortly I had my first engagement, to recite at a church in nearby Ancaster. When we arrived at the church hall, mother was fraught with tension; she sat herself on the side steps leading to the stage and held her hand over her mouth while I walked onto the stage. But nothing went amiss. I remembered my words, and the first enormous hurdle had been jumped.

Later I played Cinderella in Mrs Rigby’s “Recital.” In my early days of studying elocution I was never able to attend a party or a social gathering without eventually being asked to recite. This made social life somewhat agonizing. I would withdraw into my shell in the early part of an evening, feeling rather ill. Once I had been “requested,” and had started on my first number, all butterflies in the stomach would disappear, and I was quite prepared to give encores! For such entertainments I preferred humour. This “home entertainment” links me with the heroines of the past, who were always asked to sing or to play in the drawing-room. Last Christmas day I went to a party of this type, and it was the jolliest evening I had spent in a long time.

We moved into a four-roomed apartment over the movie house on Main Street East, a providential location that I accepted as a reasonable substitute for the Promised Land. The theatre manager would be certain to make the gracious gesture of inviting me to enter his portals free of charge whenever the mood might take me, which would be every evening, if only mother would allow! But no gesture or words of magic incantation were ever offered. If there was a “free list,” we were not on it.

So I read movie magazines, played Ludo with my best friend, Molly Waitt, and pushed under her door down the street innocent messages written in a secret code of shameful simplicity or raced on roller skates with my terrier Trixie down the steeply inclined streets running from the base of Hamilton Mountain to Main Street, Trixie leaping and barking ahead of me on a taut leash.

Trixie was about two years old and woefully undisciplined when mother announced that an apartment was no place for a dog if it had to mope and pine alone all day scratching at the doors and that a new master was willing to take her from us. The day that Trixie pranced outside with me for the last time, so full of hope, only to be left behind at a stranger’s house, straining after me with woeful eyes, was the most awful day of my life up to that time, and one of the worst days of all my life. I have never “owned” an animal since, though I still give a piece of my heart to an animal on occasion. No one, no creature, ought ever to be made to feel, even for a brief time, abandoned.

This was a period of mindless pursuits and adolescent boredom. In spite of all the frustrations of this unsettled time, when I was aware that my mother seemed burdened and troubled in her mind, I managed to push ahead in school and did my last two grades, seven and eight, in one year. I was ready to enter high school when I was twelve.

The summer after I turned twelve we went back to ...