Читать книгу Tony Hart - A Portrait of My Dad - Carolyn Ross - Страница 9
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ОглавлениеOn a plain sheet of white paper, Tony draws a few wiggly horizontal lines with a fine black marker pen. Then, with a thicker blue watercolour marker, he adds a few more straight lines, one above the other. Taking up the black marker again, he draws a similar shape to the one already there, but adds something else – a twig.
As he draws, he quietly talks to his audience about what he is doing while music plays in the background. He talks as if his audience members are his friends – and as if each and every one of them has an understanding of what he is showing them. Next, he fills in the two shapes with a few green lines, adding some yellow, which he drags through the green to brighten the colour. Lastly, he draws a wet brush through the blue lines to create a tranquil, watery scene in which two logs are floating.
But all is not quite as it seems. With the swift addition of the twig to one log, and a pair of nostrils to the other, a single log floats along a peaceful river accompanied by a crocodile.
A nine-year-old child is not an entirely blank canvas. By that age, many things have already happened to help form his character – the love of his family, trips to the seaside, nursery school and, in this instance, the first hesitant scribbles, which would later develop into a brilliant artistic talent.
We first bump into my father when he is nine years old because it was only then that things changed in what had so far been an idyllic life. His own father, Norman, had long established himself as a hero in his son’s eyes ever since he had pulled Tony the toddler from a salty pool of water on a sun-drenched Kent beach into which he had tipped himself by running too fast across the wet sand. Tony’s mother, Evelyn, all soft beauty and kindness, doted on him, and even the arrival of younger brother Michael when Tony was five merely added to the happy family life of the Harts in their pre-war Maidstone home.
A word about my father’s drawing back then… Although the family was reasonably comfortable – indeed, Evelyn’s side of the family was once described to me by my maternal grandmother as being no less than posh – reams of paper or drawing pads were not in evidence. So the young Tony drew on the backs of envelopes. And he drew mainly clocks – or tick-tocks as he called them – with a pencil, lying on the floor of the sitting room, listening to the rumble of the trolley buses as they sparked and rattled their way down Hastings Road into the town. He also drew at nursery school on the blackboards, on paper, with pencils and wax crayons and with chalk. He drew at meal times (‘Put the paper and pencils away now, darling, and eat your food.’), in bed under the covers with the aid of a torch, in the kitchen, in the garden, everywhere, and, as he grew older, he stopped drawing clocks and began to draw everything else – people, toys, trees, buildings and animals.
So we find Tony, a happy nine-year-old, drawing patterns on the misty window of a steam train heading towards London in 1934 – and towards something ugly that was to appear on the joyous canvas that represented his young life so far.
Full of excitement, Tony was on his way to London to attend an audition for a place at the boy’s choir school of All Saints in Margaret Street. Sam Randall, an uncle, had been a chorister at All Saints a generation before, and his son John had just been accepted there. Learning that his nephew also possessed a good singing voice, Sam had recommended All Saints to Tony’s parents. Norman and Evelyn were enthusiastic about the idea and so he swiftly found himself, clean of face and shiny of shoe, travelling up to London in the care of one Mrs Drake, a Maidstone music teacher who, although very kind, would not permit him to lean out of the carriage window in case the flakes of ash and soot from the steam engine dirtied his face and clothes.
From Victoria Station, they crossed London by taxi and pulled up outside the Victorian brick church of All Saints, set amidst the iron railings and dusty pavements of the West End. They went inside and after a short wait in the hallway of the school building, Tony was summoned to a room where he sang his audition piece, Brahms’s Lullaby, to the small audience of the principal and the choirmaster – and was politely, but instantly, rejected. Given the advice to ‘train him up a bit more before we audition him again’, Mrs Drake bustled the desperately disappointed Tony away. They walked together up Margaret Street and into the West End where, to cheer him up, she took him into a Lyons Corner House. Fancy cakes and wandering gypsy violinists went some way towards making up for his disillusionment, before they embarked on the return journey home to Maidstone.
It was only a few weeks later that All Saints contacted Mrs Drake again to tell her that puberty had struck, the voice of one of the older choristers had suddenly broken, and a vacancy had arisen – would she please bring him in to audition again? So Tony and Mrs Drake made the journey up to London once more, and this time, to his delight, he was accepted. In later life, I asked him what sort of a singing voice he had had as a boy. He said that he would never have been soloist material, although, he mused thoughtfully, to have got in at all must have meant he wasn’t bad.
The euphoria of being accepted as a chorister quickly evaporated when at the start of his first term at All Saints, he found himself once again on the train bound for Victoria, but this time clutching his suitcase and choking back the tears. His father had already left for work, so Norman could not accompany Tony to the station and their goodbyes had already been said. But the railway line passed close by Norman’s office building and, knowing exactly which train his boy was on, his father waved a tea towel out of his office window as it went by. It must have been a wonderfully heartening message for a young boy, knowing that everyone would see the distant flapping white signal but that it was a message of love and encouragement for him alone.
Life at All Saints was a strange existence, privileged in some ways – there were only 14 boys at the choir school, with normal lessons interwoven between choir practice and services. The classroom and dormitories were in a separate building from the church, reached across a small paved courtyard set behind iron gates leading off Margaret Street. Under the tutelage of their young choirmaster, one William Lloyd Webber – who in later life went on not only to compose Serenade for Strings, one of my father’s favourite pieces of music, but also to father Andrew and Julian – the boys learned the hymns and harmonies and the rite and ritual of the Anglican church. They only came into contact with the adult members of the choir in the church, and my father remembers one of them miscounting the hallelujahs in the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, and belting out at the top of his voice to the delight of the boys, ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Halle – damn!’
Each morning, one chorister would have to get up an hour before the rest to go and serve as an altar boy amidst the gloom and incense at the early morning service. This did, however, bring its own privilege: Matron would specially cook the boy an egg, even asking how he wanted it done. Once the serving chorister had eaten his egg in solitary splendour and was safely despatched across to the church, Matron would run two cold baths in the bathroom on the floor below their dormitory, and then go and wake the other boys. On her shout of ‘Next!’ the boys would strip off their pyjamas and run naked in pairs down the stairs, leap into a bath, splash and leap out again. Seriously character-building stuff. After breakfast came lessons and these were taken at 14 desks squeezed into a small classroom lined with books. Everything seemed small at All Saints. The three youngest boys slept in a little room close to Matron, while the remaining 11 slept in a room not much bigger on the floor above. It should have been more fun than it actually was, but the consequences of any boy being caught out of bed or larking about during the night would not just mean a reprimand, but also a beating.
Behind the doors of All Saints the principal, Father Foster, ruled the choristers with a discipline that went beyond everything that we would deem politically correct, or just downright decent, today. There was a points system in operation. Any misdemeanours during the week, which included singing a wrong note in church, or making a blot or a spelling mistake in a workbook in class, would be totalled up on the Sunday; if they added up to a certain amount, the boys would be summoned in turn to the Father’s study, where they would be chastised and beaten – sometimes with a wooden paddle, sometimes with a cane.
The beatings alone wouldn’t have been so bad, and doubtless some were well earned. But once over, all the boys wanted to do was to get away as quickly as possible, to rub the tears of pain and humiliation out of their eyes. Having administered the beating, however, Father Foster would put away the cane and then stroke and kiss the boys’ bottoms, while crooning soft words of contrition. It was monstrous behaviour, which neither my father, nor his brother later on – nor it seems any of the pupils – ever spoke of to their parents. The boys instinctively knew that behaviour of this nature was wrong; but it was being perpetrated by the man whose very position commanded obedience. The dichotomy this presented was impossible for them to understand.
The summons to the study for any wrongdoer was by means of an electric bell. Each boy had his own code, and my father’s was two long rings, which meant that later, even when grown up, Tony could never quite hear an old-fashioned telephone ring without an inward flinch. But in spite of Father Foster’s revolting little ways, the boys did manage to have some fun and found a good deal to laugh about.
One morning, at Easter, the choristers took their places in the choir stalls as usual and prepared to sing. Before they could draw breath, to their total amazement a group of men clad in long black robes with tall black hats and bearing long grey beards approached the chancel. There, in the dim light on the steps leading up to the altar, they proceeded to make a cake, wielding flour, milk and eggs with all due solemnity. For a chorister to laugh in church bore the penalty of a serious beating or even expulsion. Mere eye contact with another chorister was a corporal offence. But as we’re all aware, when we are not supposed to laugh something mildly humorous becomes terribly funny, and my father and his fellow choristers – mischievous boys all aged between nine and thirteen – were stuffing handkerchiefs into their mouths, biting the insides of their cheeks and doubling over in a futile attempt not to laugh at the cake-making black-clad greybeards.
Needless to say, the cane was wielded with a vengeance after the cake-making episode. Had the boys been told that visiting Greek Orthodox priests were going to make a holy Easter cake in the church as part of their religious ceremony, it is possible they could have treated the occasion with the solemnity it deserved. Then again, they probably couldn’t have.
The choristers sang twice a day and, of course, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which meant that for Tony, living a long way away from the school, Christmas with his family did not really start until Boxing Day. Happily, there were compensations: tasty pork sausages for supper on Christmas Eve – a rare treat during wartime, and a visit to Drury Lane and the pantomime. And there was some comfort to be had in the ever-present shape of Matron who, whilst providing a kindly mother-figure for the younger boys, also ran the sanitarium with military precision.
At one point, Tony developed a large and interesting boil on his forearm. This was dressed and coated with unguents but continued to flourish. Matron surveyed the offending boil one morning and told the young Tony, ‘We’re going to have to lance it.’ Pale with fright, Tony gasped, ‘Oh no, Matron, please don’t lance it!’ ‘Now then,’ she said, ‘be my brave ducky.’ Thus exhorted, Tony bore up with fortitude and his boil was duly lanced with a cauterised darning needle, producing a very satisfactory eruption of pus, and rapidly healed.
For those seeking her ministrations, the route to Matron’s room was along a narrow corridor, which was always referred to as ‘Matron’s Back Passage’ accompanied by adolescent snickering. Rather fond of Matron, the young Tony always felt this was not quite the done thing.
Aside from dealing with minor ailments, singing and doing his lessons, Tony made the discovery that he was a reasonable actor, and took part in the school plays. His first role was two lines as Dunois’s page in Bernard Shaw’s St Joan. Waiting by the river, the page leaps to his feet crying, ‘See, see, there she goes!’ Dunois, who has been sitting gazing dreamily at the water replies, ‘Who? The maid!’ ‘No,’ replies the page, ‘the kingfisher!’ Tony poured his heart and soul into his tiny role while the part of Joan was, he says, brilliantly played by one of the other boys.
The roles he acted in subsequent school productions grew larger until he was eventually cast in the leading role of Francis of Assisi in The Little Plays of Saint Francis. Among the audience at one of these performances was Shayle Gardner, an American actor not entirely without influence in the film industry. He was so impressed by Tony’s performance that he wanted to take him to the States to pursue an acting career, and suggested this to Norman and Evelyn who, unsurprisingly, were not in favour of the idea.
In a letter penned many years later to Brian Davies, a fellow-pupil who played St Francis’s sidekick Brother Juniper in The Little Plays of St Francis, my father describes Shayle Gardner as looking like Toulouse Lautrec’s painting of Aristide Bruant – complete with black hat, scarf and cape. It seems Mr Gardner would not have been entirely appropriate as a guide and mentor to the young Tony, as he nonplussed the boys at All Saints by insisting that they all visit a London gallery to admire a nude sculpture. The insidious Father Foster also persuaded Tony’s parents that the American was ‘not suitable’ for a boy of my father’s age to travel with – a view shared by Brian Davies, who recalls Shayle Gardner as being a very strange man. This may have been the case, but it is interesting to reflect for a moment on what might have happened if he had gone. In his letter to Brian, Tony reflects that Gardner must have had visions of another Freddie Bartholomew – a British child actor who became popular in the 1930s in such Hollywood films as Anna Karenina and Little Lord Fauntleroy.
But a career in Hollywood was not to be, and Tony stayed on at school where, in the summer months, he and the other boys would be taken out into the countryside for walks and, at the end of term, play cricket matches – pupils against fathers. Tony’s father Norman, bowling against the younger boys, took it gently. One of the other fathers – the father of Saint Joan, in fact – went all out and bowled hard, fast and furious balls at the boys. Going out to bat, one of these hit Tony square in the teeth, and for decades afterwards he smiled with the lopsided smile he had developed to hide the broken front tooth. It was decades later, when he was in his sixties, that he finally had the tooth crowned and was able to smile with a broad toothy grin – but only when he remembered. The lopsided smile is the natural one.
My father was one of the ‘Saturday Boys’. Any chorister who lived near enough to go home on a Saturday did so, but had to be back by four o’clock in the afternoon to prepare for Evensong. Maidstone was much too far for Tony to go home for the day, so he and the other Saturday Boys would go walking in Regents Park, or wander into the West End to gaze covetously over the delights to be found in the windows of Woolworths or Hamleys toy shop.
The school holidays of course were spent blissfully at home in Maidstone in the company of Tony’s parents, his brother Michael, and Peggy, their terrier. But a dark shadow was cast as the summer holidays of 1939 drew to a close when the family, gathered around the radio, heard Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announce that Britain had declared war on Germany. A subdued hush descended upon the Harts, a mood that remained unbroken until my father, who had run upstairs, came running back down clutching his air rifle and saying, ‘Don’t worry – I’ll protect you!’
The remainder of Tony’s schooling took place during the war years. With 1940 came the first bombings over London, and the boys of All Saints were evacuated to a large country house in Sussex. There they were reasonably safe, although there were some air raids. The boys were alerted to the first one by what sounded to them like a faint knocking sound, but which was actually the distant crump of bombs exploding. Father Foster came flying downstairs in a panic calling to the boys to go down to the cellars where they stayed in safety until the sounds ceased. It didn’t take long for Tony to discover that by knocking softly on the wood panelling in the classroom during a tedious lesson he could produce a very similar sound to the distant bombs, and Father Foster, turning pale, would leap to his feet and order the boys to the safety of the cellar.
Back at home, the Hart family had been issued with a Morrison shelter – a steel indoor shelter with meshed sides that was over six feet long and four feet wide and designed to shield the family in the event of a bomb falling on their house. It also served my father as a brilliant studio table for his artwork when, during the holidays, he would draw to order for Michael and his friends.
In 1940 the years at All Saints finally came to an end, and the 15-year-old Tony won a scholarship to Clayesmore, a boys’ public school in Dorset. He and his mother Evelyn went on the train to look at the school set deep in the heart of the countryside. They were shown the dormitories, the classrooms, the chapel, the grounds, and when my father said he was interested in painting and drawing, the art studio. This, he thought, was heaven!
Life at Clayesmore was to contrast sharply with the strictures of All Saints. There were no cold baths and no beatings. There were punishments certainly, but a typical one would be three ‘rollers’. This meant the boys had to run up and down the cricket pitch three times with the heavy roller that flattened the ground – it was more like fun than a punishment, and it served a useful purpose. These were happy years for him. He admits to doing well in Art and English but was pretty bad at everything else.
As a child, I loved to hear stories from his schooldays, particularly any that had anything to do with his friend Gibson. Gibson was in the same year as my father and famous for doing anything that was silly, annoying or just funny. Once, during a game of rugby, the ball was thrown into a tree where it stuck fast. ‘Gibson, get up that tree and get the ball down,’ instructed the sports master. Gibson obligingly scrambled up into the branches of the tree, retrieved the ball and sat there, hugging it to his chest. ‘Well, come on, boy, throw it down!’ barked the sports master. Gibson cuddled the ball tighter to his chest. ‘No!’ he replied with a happy smile. ‘Gibson, I’m warning you, throw that ball down now!’ ‘No!’ came the reply once more. ‘Gibson, if you don’t pass that ball down right now…’ Grinning knowingly at each other, Tony and the rest of the boys abandoned the game, knowing that if Gibson had decided to stay in his tree with the ball, it was going to be a long time before he came down.
Apart from rationing, the cold fingers of war did not penetrate too deeply into the Dorset countryside. At home in Maidstone during the holidays it was quite a different matter – with Norman and Evelyn even telling my father not to come home straight away at the end of one term, as his journey would take him through London and the bombing raids. Ever the obedient son, my father completely ignored this advice and got home perfectly safely, much to his parents’ annoyance and delight. One day sitting out in the garden, Tony heard the sound of some kind of aircraft, but not like any he had heard before. Looking up, he saw a sinister looking object flying high overhead – it was the first of the V1s, or Doodlebugs, as they were known – an unmanned flying bomb on its way to London. Quickly, my father made a sketch of the wicked looking rocket-shaped object with its boxy wings and tail, and took it to the local Maidstone newspaper where it appeared in the next issue. These Doodlebugs were fuelled with petrol and set on a course to London over Kent. When the petrol was used up, the engine would cut out and the bomb would fall to earth. People in the capital city (including my mother who was a child in Paddington at the time) would hear the engine stop, and would know it would be ten seconds before the bomb hit the ground and exploded. After my father’s drawing of the first one appeared in the paper, Doodlebugs became a common sight as they droned high in the sky over the eastern counties on their deadly mission towards London.
Back in the leafy, peaceful countryside of Dorset, Tony was discovering there were many more things to do at Clayesmore than there had been at All Saints – which had really only offered reading, writing, arithmetic and choral singing. Clayesmore offered a wealth of subjects and activities. Almost as soon as Tony arrived, he volunteered to join the Army Cadets. He quickly discovered that he liked maps and map reading, and became very good at it. He was also a good marksman with a rifle and won several competitions. And once again, he took part in the school plays, making a perfectly acceptable young lady as Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest.
And it was at Clayesmore that my father’s talent for drawing was first noted and nurtured – at All Saints they hadn’t been interested. His art master was the first real artistic influence in Tony’s life, teaching him everything he could about the subject and providing encouragement, although little was needed. It was this master, the waspish but witty Mr Scadding, who recognised that the young Tony was concentrating solely on linear drawing. He told my father that he was missing out on a lot and immediately undertook to introduce him to other mediums – showing him how to lay colour and which brushes to use, and putting him right in his painting when things went wrong. For my father, this tutelage in his favourite subject, combined with the beauty and grandeur of Clayesmore, was indeed heaven.
It seems the sharpest memories of youth tend to be drawn from the summer months, and when combined with love and music, the nostalgic sweetness of the memory is almost tangible. Such is an image of Clayesmore that my father treasured. It was summer, and some of the boys were rehearsing The Yeomen of the Guard by Gilbert & Sullivan on the lawn. The rest of the boys were lying around on the grass in the sunshine watching and listening to the music, and sitting up among them, dressed all in white, was the trim and youthful shape of the Assistant Matron with whom, unbeknownst to her, my father was hopelessly in love.
I visited both of my father’s schools. Clayesmore gives an impression of quiet grandeur, its stately brick buildings glowing peacefully in the sunshine, its extensive grounds, brushed with green lawns and shaded by majestic trees, breathe peace and tranquillity. It is worlds removed from All Saints. Peeking through the church doors, my impression was of a dim interior where feeble shafts of sunlight were waging an eternal war against the gloom, permeated by a subtle all-pervading smell evocative of age and decay. Not, perhaps, the ideal place for young boys to grow and develop – and especially not under the rule of Father Foster. However, all experiences, both good and bad, help to form the character of a person, and, like the greatest masterpiece, it is necessary to have a mixture of light and shade in order to show the subject to its best advantage.
Despite the unhappy aspects of All Saints, my father left it with an enduring love for choral music, and some liking for high-church rite and ritual. The school eventually closed in 1968, and my father never went back to visit, although he met Father Foster once more, long after he had left All Saints. He had been drawing for children in Sidcup to raise money for their school and, knowing that this was where Father Foster now lived, he looked up his address in the phone book and went to his house. As he hesitated at the gate, the front door opened to reveal Father Foster’s sister standing there smiling at him. ‘We saw in the paper you would be here,’ she said, ‘and wondered if you would come.’ Tony went in and was taken up to Father Foster’s room. Now elderly and unwell, the man was in his pyjamas, sitting up in a chair by the bed. They talked pleasantly for a while about my father’s work, and touched briefly on the things that had been fun at All Saints, but when Tony stood up to leave and held out his hand, Father Foster recoiled. ‘Don’t touch me!’ he said. Trying to forget all that was repellent about the man, my father swiftly left the house.
He returned to Clayesmore, however, several times, and many years later on one such visit he encountered one of his former masters, now quite elderly, on the lawn where afternoon tea was in progress. ‘Hello Sir!’ he said. The old man peered at him. ‘Ah, Hart N A isn’t it?’ My father agreed that it was. ‘How is Hart M C?’ Younger brother Michael was at the time appearing as an actor on stage in the West End. ‘He’s in The Pyjama Game, Sir,’ replied Tony enthusiastically. The old man looked pensive. ‘Hmm well, oh dear, is he? Still, I suppose somebody has to make them.’