This Much Is True

Every day, I used to walk to and from school along Banbury Road. Daddy insisted on it and my parents wouldn’t buy me a bicycle; I didn’t own one until I went to Cambridge. It wasn’t a particularly long journey, but trudging up and down that same stretch of road every day, past Squitchey Lane, past the parade of shops, past Lodge the Jewellers where Mummy had her rings cleaned, and Axtell’s the Chemist (Gillian Axtell was in the form below), I would invent little plays and voice all the characters, striding along, talking animatedly to myself. People would notice me and I could see them wondering: ‘What is she doing? What is she talking about?’ Without knowing it, I was honing the improvisational skills often taught in drama schools; I was flexing my imagination. It would stand me in good stead later, when I went for my audition for BBC radio drama.

In 1958, I played Gertrude in our school play of Hamlet. Miss Gummer directed, and Nina Katkov was Hamlet. Nina was spellbinding — a true star. She was tall and beautiful, with dark eyes and honey-coloured, curly hair. I was in love with her, but I knew I had to keep that secret. I hope I did. She moved quickly and gracefully; she had a natural feel for the text. When she was on stage, no one else existed. I wasn’t jealous, just in awe. She was a magical person, mercurial and compelling. She died aged twenty-five in 1970. I mourn her still.

As Brutus in Julius Caesar, my toga kept slipping off, revealing rather more bosom than Brutus was normally expected to have; some parents in the front row showed alarm. On another occasion, in the junior school, when I was Bottom in ‘The Dream’ I forgot my words, but I didn’t crumble or hesitate — I just made up some nonsense and carried on.

When I was young, acting was just showing off. As you grow older, you realise the responsibility you have towards the writer and their text, and to the audience. You come to understand it’s not all about you.

The Facts of Life

I was the first person in my class to have periods; I was eleven. It came as a surprise. Mummy wasn’t prudish (after all, she did her housework in the nude) but she hadn’t expected menstruation to erupt so early in my life and hadn’t yet mentioned it. I don’t know when people are supposed to become aware of such things; Miss Keay in upper third biology did cover sperm and testicles, ovaries and fallopian tubes etc., although we never felt involved. It was not our bodies under the microscope.

So I was worried when I found blood in my knickers; I told Mummy at once. ‘Oh, my goodness, you’ve started your periods,’ she said, and rushed to tell Grandma. ‘Darling, you’re very young but it’s all right. It’s perfectly normal, everybody has them and you just have to deal with it.’ Mummy had never heard of Tampax (invented in 1931!) — she decreed do-it-yourself sanitary towels. We went to the chemist, Mummy bought masses of cotton wool and gauze, and we had a practice session in the kitchen as she taught me to make my first sanitary towel. ‘Just pop it in your knickers,’ Mummy said cheerfully, in a Joyce Grenfell voice. It was a nuisance; a bloody awful business, in every sense.^[6] But Mummy had a Dickensian solution for period pains — gin. Apparently, when she was little, Grandma had supplied gin to help Mummy’s pains and she was continuing the tradition. I developed a real taste for gin, which I’ve never lost.

Mummy used to call it being ‘poorly’, so, of course, it always had a negative connotation. It was worrying because when you were playing hockey, you didn’t want blood to come through your clothes and be seen. That was always the major anxiety when you had a period. We used to worry about it a lot, and think, ‘Can people smell it? Does it show?’ It was the thing you wanted to hide more than anything. You didn’t want anyone to see you changing a sanitary towel or dealing with its disposal. Eventually, I discovered I didn’t have to make my own any more: ready-made sanitary towels were available at the chemist. Much later on, after I left Cambridge, Tampax arrived in my life. A friend shouted instructions through the loo door in a Soho restaurant. Even with her help, I suffered greatly as I inserted and left the cardboard sheath inside me, too; she hadn’t explained it was merely the cover and the real deal was inside.