Snakes and Ladders Read online

  DIRK BOGARDE

  SNAKES AND LADDERS

  For

  Elizabeth and George

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  A Note on the Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Appendices

  “Man in the Bush”

  “Steel Cathedrals”

  Extract from script of “I Could Go On Singing”

  Filmography

  Plate Section

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter 1

  When I started to write the first book about the story of my life, which took me up to the age of eighteen, it was with motives which were, I suppose, rather muddled. One, certainly, was to try to discover whether or not I had any ability for writing as such, another was to occupy myself when the weather was too bad for me to work my few acres, and somewhere, buried in the midst of it, was the idea that I might be able to say something about the whole process of becoming an actor—the kind of natural instincts given one and the manner in which they were gradually developed both by myself and by the people I met along the way, so that they were ultimately fused by experience into something usable in a profession which I desperately wanted to follow. I imagined that what I had to say about myself might offer some clues to a new generation of would-be actors and actresses, or even to parents, who so often oppose the longing to enter a profession which is insecure, and by some people still denigrated.

  One of the things which I have learned is that for a good ninety per cent of the people who want to become actors it is a mistake, and leads to poverty and unhappiness. For the other ten per cent it can be, as it has been in my case, in varying degrees, rewarding and enriching, and because I have had quite a few letters from young people as a result of the first book asking me how one does it, I have been encouraged to write most of the rest of what is inevitably something of an ego trip. Well, ego, for better or for worse, is very much involved in this business of being an actor, because we are creatures who are obliged to use our own beings as our instrument, and we tend to have to keep reassuring ourselves—and looking for reassurance—as to how good that instrument is. It tends to make us very boring as people unless we are on constant guard against a total self-preoccupation. And it has the more dangerous hazard of cutting us off from what I think to be the mainspring of all good acting, which is the minute observation of one’s fellow creatures, who are really the fuel which feeds our attempts to create a living character.

  So this book, the continuation of my ego trip, is also an endeavour to portray just a few of the people who have helped me to become whatever sort of an actor I may be. Living their own lives, they are also my life. In trying to compress thirty years of living into a book which may well be too long anyway, it is inevitable that many of them cannot appear, however important they may have been. Perhaps they may be only too pleased not to be mentioned … time will tell; but I, at least, am sorry. Anyway: to begin with, there was Gooley.

  When we got to York the woman who had been sitting in the corner window-seat, knitting something fluffy, took a couple of brown paper parcels off the rack, slung her chintz knitting bag over her arm and threaded her way carefully past our disconsolate knees. We didn’t try to help her. She wrenched at the door and clambered down on to the platform without a backward look, slamming the door hard behind her. We sat in dejected silence, as we had ever since we left King’s Cross. None of us had spoken throughout the journey, except the woman, who had said that this was a Non Smoker and that if any one of us tried to smoke she’d vomit. So we had lumbered into the corridors and lolled against the windows, watching the rain start as the train trailed smoke across the grimy fields of the Home Counties shortly after Watford.

  Now we had creaked and huffed into York. I stared at my own reflection in the dirty window; fist screwed into my face mottled with sooty raindrops down the glass. A tropical disease. Cholera. Something dreadful. Mazawattee Tea … Swan Pens … Careless Talk Costs Lives … Stephens Ink … Claudette Colbert in … but the title blurred away as we jolted into movement. Air Raid Shelter … Waiting Rooms … Gentlemen … we gathered speed for Darlington.

  The compartment gradually relaxed with the woman’s departure. We spread out a bit, and pulled crumpled cigarettes from pocket-squashed packets. The air was pleasant with the hazy blue of smoke, the sweet smell of tobacco. The youth sitting opposite me, short, thick, muscular, with greasy black hair spiky like a wet cat’s, chucked his Gold Flake into my lap. I had run out ages ago, neurotically, in the corridor.

  “Dere you are. Help yourself. Two packets in me case. Got a light?” I had, and we lit up. He pushed the crumpled packet back into the sagging pocket of his tired grey cardigan.

  “De ould bitch! ‘Dis is a non smoker … I’ll vomit.’ Dat’s a real civilian now, a real bastard civilian for youse. I know de kind. I know ’em.” He slumped down into his corner and stared back at his reflection with hatred. The fact that we all were, at that moment, civilians seemed to have escaped him … we would only cease to be human at 23.59 hours when the barrack gates shut behind us and our own particular Hells began. But until then we were still free. Civilian and free. The Army waited.

  Suddenly he leant across, prodding me into attention on the knee with a dirty thumb. “You know someting? As a matter of fact it’s one of dem civilian women like her is de reason I’m sittin’ on me arse in dis fucking train at all … an ould bitch, just like dat, t’in and scrawny like an ould hen. It was in dis little sweetie shop, you see, up Charlotte Street, she was ironing or doing some fuckin’ ting in de back shop, and when she saw me picking up a few little bits and pieces like, she let out wid such a screaming and a hollering I had to hit her hard wid de little iron she had, to stop her, you see? And den she fell onde floor squawking like she had seen de Resurrection so I hit her again, not much of a whack, wasn’t dat hard, just a couple of times to be sure. And would you believe it, dat evening de papers said an ould woman had been attacked by hooligans and was near to death.” He stared away from me out at the darkening sky. Suddenly he snorted. “Hooligans!” He shook his wet-cat head in amazement. “Dere was only me!”

  No one took any notice of him, or showed the least interest. We all had our own problems and worries, and I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t bluffing anyway out of boredom. But he had given me his cigarette. He might offer me another later.

  “And why are you on the train then? They didn’t get you?”

  He looked at me with thin eyes and blew smoke down each nostril separately, which I thought quite effective.

  “Not me. Paddy Gooley? Dey never caught me for nothing. Joined the King’s bleeding army, didn’t I? Took his shilling; a good boy from the Republic. Well …” he squashed his cigarette stub on to the floor, “dere was no point in hanging around just waiting, now was dere?”

  “Won’t they catch up with you in the army even so?”

  “Once I’m in, I’m in and safe, and, me darlin’ boy, the first ting Gooley does on his first leave, in twenty-t’ree weeks’ time, is to slip back to me lovely Emerald Isle with me boots and battledress, never to return. You tink I’m soft?”

  He was grinning cheerfully and gave me a long slow wink as if we had both been conspirators in the little sweetie shop. His implied acceptance pleased me. Only I felt that I was the one who would be caught.

  “You’re a toff, aren’t youse?” he asked
suddenly.

  “I don’t think so, why?”

  “Ach … you talk like one. I don’t mind. What was you in Civvie Street den?”

  “An actor.”

  “Sweet Christ! An actor! Would I know you den?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Was you ever at de Bedford, Camden Town? Or Chiswick? Dey had real good shows dere.”

  “No never. At the Q …”

  Suspicion crept into his bashed face.

  “Where’s dat den?”

  “Outside London really. Kew Bridge. I wasn’t famous or anything.”

  “Oh.” He dismissed me, and looked out at the sombre May sky. Across the fields a woman cycled, head bowed against the rain; it was almost dark. The man sitting beside me, older than the rest of us, leant confidentially towards me and said in a low voice: “I heard you say you were an actor which is very funny, you see, because I was with the Palmers Green Light Operatic Society for quite some time. It’s funny you and I being of the same persuasion, so to speak, in the same compartment! Only amateur status, I’m afraid, me I mean, still we did some lovely shows there, you know, before this caper started. Last one we did was ‘The White Horse Inn’. A very jolly show. Lots of very hummable tunes. A jolly show but most tasteful. Rather expensive.” He smiled knowingly, as one professional to another. “We had a bit of trouble with the boat, you know. There’s a paddle steamer type of thing, end of the Second Act, cost us a lot of headaches, as you can imagine. But Ileen Mirren and Mrs Croft did a remarkable job; it brought down the house. Funnel smoking, paddles turning, all that sort of thing, really marvellous. Of course the Chorus said it made them cough. They are for ever complaining choruses are, aren’t they? Proper prima donnas the lot of them; but I don’t think anyone really noticed very much. I must say it was a jolly show. I thought you’d be interested, you being an actor as you said. Birds of a feather, you might say! Quite a coincidence really.”

  He smiled at me encouragingly. I nodded and smiled back like an idiot. Across the compartment Gooley had taken out a rosary and was absentmindedly fiddling with it, the crucifix winking in the mean blue light from the electric light bulb in the roof. I didn’t want to talk about the theatre or acting; that had been all put aside. Now I would only think of the future and how best to bend it to me, how to save myself in this new, daunting life which lay a very few hours ahead. But Palmers Green wasn’t going to give in easily. After a while he asked me in a low, gruff voice, as if he was soliciting, whether I knew Richard Tauber or Binnie Hale, and when I said no, not personally, he smiled sadly and looked away into a past of smoking paddle steamers.

  For my part, grateful for the respite, I stared out at the now dark countryside. The gleam of wet roofs here and there, a chimney stack hard against the scudding clouds, telegraph posts whipping past like sticks in a fence. I remembered my father’s words of only last night, at our last family dinner. “It’ll take a bit of getting used to, of course, but it will be a good experience for you; you may one day look back upon it all as among some of the happiest times of your life. I know that I did.” And I knew that he was telling me an arrant lie. His had been an appalling war and he suffered from it for the rest of his life. All he was doing, I knew, was jollying me along at that particular moment. Like the dentist who says this won’t hurt you. No point in frightening the wits out of the patient before the operation. The operation itself would see to that.

  * * *

  At Darlington we had to change trains for Richmond. It seemed to be the middle of the night. The cold dank of the North, smell of gas lamps and wet concrete, of soot and oily engines; draggled shadows bumping suitcases across the crowded station, in and out of the pools of light from the blackout shades, the hiss of steam and the clatter of tea trolleys; blindly we swam through the cross currents of hunched commuters like a shoal of fish, instinctively, mindlessly, until someone in uniform at the head of the shoal halted us into a colliding huddle and directed us raggedly towards another platform and yet another train. At Richmond in a wet moor-mist, on gleaming, slippery cobbles, in a biting wind and with only torches flashing about like distracted fireflies, we stood miserably about while other uniformed men barked orders and forced us shuffling into what were called “Alphabetical Groups” … all the A’s and all the B’s and so on. As V*, I found myself down at the far end of the long line of shuddering trucks, loaded up, tail boards slammed shut, bolts run home, tarpaulins roughly pulled down to protect us from the misty rain, and in darkness, and silence, we moved off through the night to Catterick Camp. All I knew was that we had to report to “Lecatto Lines”, and that I was suddenly very hungry. I had had nothing to eat since the morning with Vida at Lyons Corner House, when misery had doused my appetite even for a lump of squashy gateau. The truck was full, some of us standing among the knees and suitcases of the luckier ones sitting on long wooden forms, hanging on with one arm to the steel supports of the roof, empty suitcases in the other. We rumbled and bumped along twisting roads and hills for an eternity. No one spoke.

  Catterick Camp was a bleak, lightless huddle of hut roofs, jagged against the steel night sky. Torches flashing at the Main Gate, sentry boxes, wire, questions shouted and answered. I heard the phrase “New Intake” a couple of times and realised that that was what we were.

  We crunched about on gleaming gravel for a time, bumping into each other, then were formed into squads and marched through the wet night to huts. Ours was up a muddy track. We slid and clambered along in the dark, snagged by bushes on either side. The hut was bleak, cold, two lamps whipping leaping shadows round the brick walls and tin roof in the draught. We were told to choose a bed site, from piles of grubby mattresses on the floor, shown where the Ablutions were, and where to put our personal possessions. Large metal two-door meat-safes evenly spaced all down each side of the cement-wet hut. “Three biscuits each for your beds,” said a weary corporal indicating the pile of mattresses, “and if anyone wants extra, there’s straw out in the yard. Help yourselves.”

  Later we were marched back down the track to the Mess Hall. A gaunt raftered shed, scrubbed tables and benches, three iron stoves smouldering sullenly down the middle, at one end a long counter with urns, mugs and bundles of knives and forks in cardboard boxes. Condensation sweated down the yellow walls.

  Sitting, twenty to a table, we ate fried sausages, boiled potatoes, carrots, two slices of thick margarined bread, with a pint mug of scalding tea. In the centre of each table, a bottle of Daddies Sauce. Next to me, Palmers Green, exhausted, eyes glazed, face soap-stone. Opposite, a tall blond boy, cool, spruce, his mouth a coathanger of disdain.

  “Won’t quite do, will it? Should be organised by now … we’ll lose the war this way. Name’s Tilly, P. W., Chartered Accountant; you know Hendon Central? Thought you might.” He looked coldly round the chewing mass. “Hope they put up the lists pretty soon, get our names down right away … want to avoid any mistakes, don’t you think? I’m in your hut if you need any advice.”

  I thanked him and told him that I was perfectly happy, wanting only to live a quiet life, giving no trouble and receiving none. He cracked a couple of knuckles loudly.

  “Stay a ranker for the duration? More responsibility as an officer surely?”

  “I don’t want responsibility!”

  “You’d rather stay herded together with this crowd for the rest of the war? Not me. I say! I think your friend’s going to be ill.”

  Back in the hut we scrabbled about laying out our mattresses, stacking suitcases on the meat-safes, sorting out washing kit and the sad relics of home in the shape of our colourful, personal, hand towels. We queued to wash hands and teeth and to urinate. The concrete floor awash with water, suds and spittle. The weary corporal shouted, “Lights out in ten minutes, you lot,” and everyone struggled back to undress and some, not all, to drag on a sad variety of pyjamas. Then to bed. Two hairy blankets stiff as card, a round, striped, greasy bolster, clothes neatly piled beside one’s head for th
e morning. I wound my watch and realised that it had been 14 hours since we had all said goodbye at home that morning in the bright, sharp, Sussex light. I wondered, as the lights switched off, if my mother had managed to put in her rows of wintergreens; when I’d be able to write to them; what Vida was doing at this moment? Was there a raid perhaps in London. Had my father got home from The Times or was he, like me, sleeping on the floor in his office, as he so often had to do? Was it warm down there, as it had been last night by the pond when we sat watching the dog snuffling about for a rat in the sedge? A great welling misery rose in my heart and swept swiftly to my throat. Tears, unwanted, salt and hot, swelled through tightly closed eyelids; I thrust my face into the greasy bolster and hoped it would smother them. My shaking only lasted a moment or two, and then I lay silent, staring into the blackness. I was more than relieved to hear, about me, that one or two other people were in the same condition. Someone coughed gently, and blew his nose. Gradually the hut became still. The cinders from the dying stove rustled into the grate. The man on the floor on my right started to snore. Someone farted. I thought it was probably Gooley.

  * * *

  After they had issued us with numbers, handed out sizeless new-smelling uniforms, boots made of forged iron, button sticks, gas masks and a heavy Lee Enfield rifle, plus tin helmet and camouflage net, I folded my green tweed suit from Gamages Fire Sale, the canary yellow polo necked shirt, my suede shoes a size too large, the colourful personal towel, shoved them all in the empty suitcase which had travelled with me from home, and bundled it all back. I was left with only my washing gear, a photograph of the family standing smiling by the pond, a copy of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and a pile of blue notebooks ready for the Poetry which Vida felt sure, although I was much in doubt, would flood from me in the moments when, as she had put it cheerfully, “the others were cleaning their rifles or boots”. Little did we know on those halcyon evenings at her flat during the blitz in Belsize Crescent, that when they were doing that so, indeed, should I be. Poetry waited for the quiet times in the NAAFI on Sunday afternoons after we had marched to Church, had lunch, and the rest of the day to ourselves.