This Much Is True

I had to get to Valletta because I was carrying the plane tickets. No wonder Pat looked so anxious. I stood there, looking desperately around the harbour, where there were, of course, a lot of rowing boats and fishermen, who naturally had sat and watched the whole farcical scene unfold. I went up to one of the fishermen and I said, ‘I missed the ferry, is there any chance you could row me to Valletta?’ And this old chap said, ‘Sure, sure, get in.’

I jumped down into his boat. It was quite a big drop down to sea-level from the mooring place. When I landed in the little wooden vessel it very nearly upended with the force of my significant bulk. Once it, and I, had regained equilibrium, I sat in the stern and he started to row.

It was quite a long way over to Valletta by rowing boat, and so we chatted to pass the time. He was a nice, old fellow in dungarees and he spoke good, albeit heavily accented, English. He said, ‘You see this island?’ I said, ‘Oh, yes, I haven’t been there.’ He said, ‘That is Comino. Nobody live there. We go to Comino, you and me, now.’ I said, ‘No, darling, I can’t. I’ve got a plane to catch. Really, I’ve got to get there because my friend is on the ferry with all our stuff and I have the plane tickets.’ But he was insistent, ‘No, no, we go,’ he said. ‘We go!’ I replied, ‘No, we can’t go! I’ve got to get that plane.’ Then I saw that he had taken his penis out of his dungarees and he was enthusiastically masturbating. I thought, ‘Blimey, what am I going to do? I don’t want to get raped. Not on the sea.’ So, I got up, went over to him and tossed him off.

He was fine after that; he calmed down. The penis was popped back inside the dungarees and then on he rowed, all the way across. When we finally arrived, he helped me up and I asked him how much I owed. He smiled. ‘No charge, Miss.’ Bless him, what a gent!

Later, when I was telling this story to a friend and said that I had to toss him off, she replied, appalled, ‘You mean you threw him overboard?’ I said, ‘No! I didn’t throw him overboard — I tossed him off!’ She got it, eventually.

Radio, for me, is the most perfect performance medium. It’s the most concentrated: there’s nothing else to do but get the voice right. And you don’t have to learn the lines! But the creative process remains the same. Acting for radio is no different from acting for the stage, or any other medium, really; it’s an exercise in imaginative travel. You journey from yourself into this other person that you have crafted. You are using some of the bricks of your own humanity and personality, and slowly stepping over into another persona which you are inventing, based on the text that you’re given and the backstory that you might imagine for yourself. It’s always about creating the character with truth — that’s the job, whatever medium you’re working in.

Radio drama taught me that you should always talk to an audience as if it’s one person. Working in radio teaches you to focus totally on the person you’re talking to. It was superb training. In my early radio days, you could stand on either side of the mike and look into the eyes of the actor opposite. But, later, microphones developed and we actors found ourselves on the same side of the mike. The sound might have been better, but the connection between us was much harder to achieve.

Turning the pages of the script was another skill to be mastered. It had to be done completely silently: a bunny dip away from the microphone, holding one corner of the page between thumb and finger, then turning back, having turned the page as you turned away. Modern paper makes it almost impossible to achieve a silent page turn.

The radio artists I worked with through the years were probably the most skilled in the world. I’d grown up with their voices as a child, and for me they were celebrities. Marjorie Westbury was the queen of Radio in her day. She played Paul Temple’s wife, Steve, in the famous detective series. She was small and dumpy like me, but had a clear, warm sound and knew how to use it. She made such an impression on one of her listeners that she was left £42,000 in their will.

So far, this hasn’t happened to me.

The other great ladies of my radio days were June Tobin, absurdly sexy and great fun; Grizelda Hervey, always smoking with a husky voice (no wonder) — her Irene in The Forsyte Saga was one of the greatest performances I ever heard. Mary Wimbush, who was loved — especially by Tony Jackson, a gifted young actor, who won the Carleton Hobbs radio prize at RADA and had a long affair with her, despite her being very much his senior. They’re all dead now, but their voices live on. The recordings in the BBC archives hold magic; the Corporation should digitise them all and give us the chance to listen again to the great voices of the past.