Читать книгу Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times - Peter Stanford - Страница 10

It is vital to realise that we have come through difficult years and to get through them will require no less effort, no less unselfishness and no less work than was needed to bring us through the war.

Clement Attlee, broadcast (1945)

The Central School of Speech and Drama boasted an impressive London address – the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences on Kensington Gore. This circular, red-brick and terracotta landmark, with a capacity of 10,000, had since its opening in 1871 doubled as a giant concert hall and a conference centre. This dual purpose suited Central well, for the school not only had use of various conference rooms and a mini-theatre back stage but also had access to the main auditorium at various times during the day.

As a stage from which to learn voice projection, the vast arena was unparalleled. It was also, past pupils recall, a baptism of fire. The infamous Albert Hall echo thwarted many of their best efforts and was only cured much later in 1968, when the decorated calico ceiling was replaced by the giant suspended mushroom diffusers that still hover incongruously over the auditorium today.

Most of Central’s stage work, however, took place in a small theatre housed above one of the four great porticos that lead into the Albert Hall. There were other movement rooms and a lecture theatre, with the school’s canteen and additional teaching rooms housed down the road on Kensington High Street. Being part of the life of the Albert Hall had many fringe benefits for the students, not the least of which was the chance, outside hours (and occasionally, playing truant, when they should have been in lectures), to relax in the stalls and watch and learn as a procession of musical and theatrical stars rehearsed for their evening performances. When the habit became too popular and threatened to interrupt lessons, the principal, Gwynneth Thurburn, would send a note to the absentees in the stalls, telling them that any classes skipped would have to be made up out of hours. It usually prompted an exodus, for Miss Thurburn’s word went unchallenged at Central.

She had taken over in 1942 from the founder, Elsie Fogerty, and it was her dynamism during her long reign until 1967 which transformed Central into an internationally renowned drama school and ultimately saw it move away in 1957 from the Royal Albert Hall to bespoke premises in the old Embassy Theatre at Swiss Cottage. Admittance was by interview and audition with ‘Thurby’, as she was known to staff and pupils. She could appear very stern, recalls Margaret Braund, Bronwen’s drama teacher at Dr Williams’, a graduate of Central and later a tutor there, ‘but she was also very kind, very understanding and knew in a minute what students were or weren’t capable of achieving.’ As well as a stage course, Central also offered three-year diploma courses for speech and drama teachers and for speech therapists. Thurburn believed all three to be of equal merit. ‘There is something,’ she once wrote, ‘uniting everybody in this school – actors, teachers, speech therapists. For me it certainly is the voice, being the centre of all communication.’

Though the recommendation from Miss Braund may have helped Bronwen in her interview, she would not have got in unless Gwynneth Thurburn had spotted some talent in her. With hindsight, Margaret Braund believes it may have been Bronwen’s voice. ‘Her voice had a very pleasing quality, and it was very flexible. She had grown quickly into a good actress but it is her voice that stands out in my memory.’ All three courses at Central were officially on a par, but it was the actors’ diploma which carried most glamour. The eighteen-year-old Bronwen Pugh nursed ambitions to be on the stage, but she applied instead for the teachers’ course.

Part of it was a lack of confidence. She may have shone in the small pond of Dr Williams’ school productions, but was unsure how her credits from rural Wales would fare when placed alongside a string of leading roles in cosmopolitan youth theatres. Though physically now an adult, there was still a legacy of immaturity from her sheltered school years and her treatment as the baby of the family. And there was also a vulnerability about her that at this stage of her life was linked to that immaturity, but which remained ever after, even when she had learnt about the world in sometimes the cruellest ways. Fear of rejection, of being among people who do not want her there, has been one of the strong emotions in her life, a practical weakness set against and sometimes curtailing another of her enduring qualities, her willingness to strike out on bold, unexpected and often criticised paths with an unshakeable belief that she is somehow being guided from above on a predetermined spiritual journey.

Many of her rivals for one of the coveted places on the Central actors’ course, she believed, would have been living and breathing the dream of treading the boards from the cradle, while she had come late and not entirely wholeheartedly to the idea. It was for her less a vocation, more a cross between an alternative to Oxford, something to do, a gesture of defiance and a way to be different from her sisters. Moreover, she lacked the firm parental support that might have given her, at an impressionable age, the confidence to opt for acting. Alun Pugh, whom she looked up to above all others, who taught her that if you do anything you must be the best at it, may have agreed to pay the two pounds, six shillings per term, but there was little of the instinctive sympathy for his daughter’s choice that would have greeted a decision to apply to Oxford. He had his youngest daughter down to succeed as a headmistress, so the teachers’ course was at least a compromise between her option and his.

There was a further complicating factor – one that was to haunt Bronwen throughout her professional life. The Goodyear genes made for tall women and all the Pugh girls were giants. Gwyneth was just over six foot, her mother and two sisters just under. So Bronwen was deemed by the standards of the day too tall to be a successful actress. Even in later, more tolerant times tall actresses like Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver have struggled to find female leads (she was sidelined into science fiction), but back in the 1940s anyone over five foot six faced a bleak future. Leading men had to gaze masculinely down on their petite feminine charges – women like Celia Johnson, Olivia de Havilland and Audrey Hepburn. Actresses approaching six foot would find it impossible to persuade casting directors of their merits. Of Bronwen’s generation, only the well-connected and extraordinarily talented Vanessa Redgrave – for whom she was once mistaken while on a plane – became a star despite her height.

And the slight cast in her eye, corrected by surgery in childhood but set to return at various stages of her life, also counted against her in the theatrical world of the 1940s and 1950s. Though today actresses like Imogen Stubbs have won acclaim despite having a squint, four decades ago it was considered an insurmountable obstacle to success on the stage.

Bronwen was unusually realistic for an eighteen-year-old about her own talent – or lack of it. It was as if simply being at Central – rather than Oxford – was enough for her. ‘I think that great actresses succeed because they can let go of themselves and become totally someone else. I think that even at that stage I knew myself well enough to know that I couldn’t do that. Obviously later there was an element of letting go in being a model girl, but then it was not about taking on another character. It was simply letting go. I could go half the way, but I was too self-conscious to be an actress.’

Perhaps the final deciding factor was the encouragement of her mentor, Margaret Braund, who was also pushing her towards the teachers’ course. ‘It was not that I didn’t believe in her as an actress. It was rather that I knew she was an intelligent girl and one who would need academic stimulus. You got more of that in the third year of the teachers’ course. For the first two it was virtually the same as the stage course, but in the third year the teachers did subjects like psychology and phonetics. And I also thought that she would make a good teacher. She had imagination and ideas and she could inspire others if she wanted to. Though at this stage she was still quite young for her years, she was quite mature in her dealings with others.’

After decamping from Dolgellau a term early, she spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Hampstead – part of it acting as housekeeper to her father while her mother packed up their home in Norfolk. Alun Pugh and his youngest daughter also went off together for a motoring holiday in Europe. The stated reason was so that Bronwen could practise her skills as a driver there. She was at the wheel most of the time and although driving on the opposite side of the road might not be considered as the best preparation for the British test, she nevertheless passed with flying colours on her return. ‘We were always taught that getting your driving test was as important, if not more important, than getting your highers. It made you mobile and therefore independent. Being independent was the big thing.’

The real purpose of the trip to the continent, however, was to revisit some of the battlegrounds where Alun Pugh had served in the First World War. Father and daughter did not get as far as the trenches or the graveyards. When it came to that point, he couldn’t go on. ‘He wanted to try, but he couldn’t face it. He didn’t talk about it at all. I was just there.’ The silence that seemed to encase the details of her father’s wartime trauma persisted, but Bronwen became even more acutely aware of the pain it continued to cause him. Perhaps Alun Pugh chose his youngest daughter as his companion on this trip precisely because he knew that she – unlike her more assertive older sisters – would not press him to discuss topics that were difficult for him. She was content simply to let him be.

That summer between school and college Bronwen had her first romance. It was a short-lived, shared but unspoken passion, more an early and tentative stepping stone in her own emotional development than any significant pointer to her orientation. She fell for a girl of her own age, the daughter of Major-General Sir Francis Tuker, the Gurkha chief who had inspired her as a schoolgirl with his visits to Dr Williams’, his letters from the front and his tales of bravery. Joan Tuker, the same age as Bronwen, lived on the family farm in Cornwall and the two met up several times that summer. Undoubtedly some of the awe with which Bronwen regarded Sir Francis was transferred on to Joan. ‘I put her on a pedestal and just gazed adoringly at her. She had wonderful eyes and blonde hair. I think it was the first time I realised what romance was, that I began to understand how love could develop between two people, that I had had those feelings for anyone. It lasted six months and was reciprocated, but then I think we simply grew apart, me with my life in London and she down on the farm in Cornwall. We had nothing in common really.’

Joan was, like Bronwen, a third daughter and the two shared similar frustrations about how they were simply expected to be like their successful older sisters. Bronwen compares their friendship to that of Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a stage both were going through on the road to adulthood. ‘By the end, I knew I wasn’t a lesbian. If anything it was like a practice before I entered a world where there would be men of my own age.’ They lost touch but, soon after leaving Central, Bronwen heard that Joan Tuker had died tragically young of a brain tumour.

Bronwen started at Central in September 1948. For the first term all three groups – actors, teachers and therapists – had classes together. The focus was on the voice, under the guidance of Cicely Berry, later head of voice at the Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘They’d tell us to come in in trousers and we would He down on the floor and relax with lots of oohs and aahs,’ recalls fellow student Diana de Wilton, ‘and then the teacher would say something like, “Think of a sunny day in the country,” and we’d all have to concentrate our minds on our feet and then work our way slowly up to our necks.’ On another occasion they went off to visit the mortuary at the old Royal Free Hospital in Islington to inspect the lungs of dead bodies so as to understand how to breathe and project the voice.

There were twenty students on the teaching course. It was predominandy female, with just three men. Among the acting fraternity, the star of the year was the young Virginia McKenna, later to appear in Born Free and A Town like Alice. It was the slight, elegant, conventional McKenna who was regarded as the great beauty of the set. Although the intake in 1948 was unusual in including some older students – recently demobbed from the forces, their education delayed by the war – the atmosphere at Central was less like a modern-day university and more an extension of school. The timetable was rigid, free time scarce and a well-ordered, disciplined and slightly parsimonious feel pervaded the whole institution, radiating out from Gwynneth Thurburn’s office. ‘It was always vital,’ she recalled of this early period of her principalship, ‘that if we were to keep going, we should not waste a pennyworth of electricity or a piece of paper, a habit that has become ingrained in me. If we had not kept to Queen Victoria’s remark – “We are not interested in the possibility of defeat” – we should probably not be here today.’

The controlled environment of Central was then for many of its younger students a transition point between the childish world of school and adult society rather than a straight transfer. There were, of course, new departures from school life, among them famous names on the teaching staff. The playwright Christopher Fry was a tutor, as was Stephen Joseph, later to be immortalised when Alan Ayckbourn helped fund a theatre named after him in Scarborough. One of the most distinguished voice coaches at Central was the poet and essayist L. A. G. Strong, by chance an old school friend of Alun Pugh. He would take each of his pupils to lunch on nearby Kensington High Street each term. He regarded them as adults and treated them accordingly.

Yet the freedoms now associated with student life barely existed for Bronwen and her colleagues. In part it was the prevailing social mores of the time. After the wartime blip, these had settled down into more traditional patterns. More influential was the precarious economic state of Britain. It was a grey and serious world, with only Labour’s initial radical fervour for a centralised, managed economy to set people aglow. When that ran out, along in August 1947 with the American loans that had shored up the British economy, rationing bit ever harder, shop shelves were empty and pessimism set in. The great winter crisis of 1947 was the prelude to Bronwen’s arrival at Central. It was one of the coldest on record, and the mines could not supply the power stations so electricity rationing was instituted. There were fines for switching on a light outside prescribed hours. The lack of housing – some half a million homes had been destroyed during the aerial bombardment of Britain – loomed large in many lives, with endless waiting lists even for temporary ‘prefabs’. Many despaired of ever reaching the top and between 1946 and 1949 1.25 million Britons emigrated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Rhodesia.

Basic foodstuffs remained restricted until 1954 – one egg a week, three ounces of butter, one pound of meat. And clothes were bought by coupon until 1949. While Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’, launched in Paris in early 1947, captured the public imagination, its long skirts and flowing lines harking back to an earlier age of plenty, young women in Britain had to make do with dull and utilitarian garments purchased with coupons. Even Princess Elizabeth struggled to acquire the 300 coupons needed for the Norman Hartnell -wedding dress she wore when, on 20 November 1947, she married Philip Mountbatten in Westminster Abbey.

Bronwen, liberated at last from the green and blue ensemble of Dr Williams’, did not let the post-war restrictions constrain her from developing a style of her own. On a limited allowance from her father and faced by the absence of choice in shops, she turned to dress-making with the grey satin and pink lace she could scramble together. The boat neckline was in vogue, worn without sleeves. ‘It must have looked so drab, I’ve never had any idea about colours, but I thought it was the most marvellous thing in the world.’

In contrast to most, she was once again privileged – not only in her freedom to attend the decidedly un-utilitarian environment of a drama college, but also economically. The differentials that had been eroded in the Pughs’ life by war were restored. When she turned twenty-one in June 1951, her last month at Central, she received the then considerable sum of £1,000 as her part of her maternal grandfather’s will. It enabled her to buy her first car – a convertible Morris Eight – and later to move out into her own flat, a radical departure in the early 1950s for a young, attractive, unmarried woman of her class. Usually flying the nest only took place when the parental home was being exchanged for the marital one, but the Pughs, anxious as ever that their daughters should be independent, raised no objections. Bronwen may not have moved in the same world or same league as her contemporaries among the blue-blooded debutantes who were still being presented at court, but she led a cushioned, privileged and in many senses thoroughly modern life.

For her student days and beyond, though, Pilgrims Lane remained home. She would take the tube in each morning and return every evening. Relations with her mother, never close, became at least more relaxed. Kathleen Pugh had been appointed a magistrate on the local bench. Whatever frustrations she had felt in the pre-war years at her own lack of a career were thereby assuaged and she began to resent her youngest daughter a little less. Gwyneth, working as a journalist for a farming magazine after completing her degree at Oxford, continued to be close to Bronwen, but after a short career as a sub-editor, in 1949 Ann married Reginald Hibbert, her boyfriend from Oxford, and followed this bright, high-flying diplomat overseas on a Foreign Office career that culminated in his appointment as British ambassador in Paris in 1979 and a knighthood. constantly abroad, Ann was largely absent from her younger sister’s life in the decades ahead.

In 1950, when Bronwen was just twenty, tragedy struck when David Pugh died of cancer at the age of thirty-three. He had served in the ranks in Germany during the war, but as ever his record had disappointed his parents, who would have liked to see him an officer. His marriage – to a Welsh girl on St David’s Day 1943 – should have pleased his father. It was by all accounts a happy union, but again the Pughs harboured reservations, suspecting that Marion Pugh was chasing what she supposed to be her in-laws’ wealth. After his demobilisation, David Pugh was dogged by ill-health and in 1949 cancer was diagnosed in his groin. Further tests revealed that it had already spread all around his body and within a couple of months he was dead. ‘It shattered my parents,’ says Bronwen. ‘He had never been the son they wanted. He had an unusual mind. He had perfect recall, could remember telephone numbers, facts and figures, but he could never pass exams. He was weak, sickly and highly strung. When he died there was such remorse, especially when they realised the reasons for his illness.’

A post-mortem revealed that David Pugh had a small foetus inside his ribs. During her pregnancy Kathleen Pugh, doctors suggested, had originally been carrying twins, but the fertilised ovum had not divided into two as it usually does. Instead David had absorbed his twin. It is a very rare, but recognised medical condition, though usually it is discovered soon after the surviving twin is born.* The Pughs believed that it could have explained David’s ill-health and physical weakness. It also cast an interesting psychological light on his insistence, even into his late teens, on having a place set at table for his imaginary friend ‘Fern’.

For Alun and Kathleen Pugh, the tragedy of their son’s premature death left a lasting scar. Ann Hibbert remains convinced that the grief her mother felt damaged her health and eventually contributed to the stroke she suffered many years later. For Bronwen, though, David’s death, while regretted and mourned, was something she could recover from. The age difference between them had meant that the two had never been close. However, the loss of her brother may have had one lasting effect on her life. Alun Pugh had made no secret of his ambitions for his children. His son had not satisfied him. His eldest daughter had chosen marriage and a supporting role over a career of her own. Gwyneth was happy taking a back seat. Bronwen’s natural ambition-apparent but carefully reined in as she went to Central – may have been sparked by the desire, in some way, to make good her beloved father’s disappointment.

Bronwen soon fell in with a crowd at Central. She made up a foursome with fellow students Diana de Wilton, Erica Pickard and Joan Murray. They were an oddly symmetrical quartet – two tall, two short, two fair, two dark. While they all came from middle-class backgrounds and shared a similar sense of humour and a youthful determination to be frivolous whatever the gloomy national outlook, the four had contrasting but complementary characters. Diana de Wilton was a reserved, unconfident, convent-educated Irish Catholic from Tunbridge Wells, brought up by adoptive parents, while Joan Murray, small, witty and outgoing, had a Scottish father and French Jewish mother. It was Erica Pickard, however, who was the pivot of the group. The other three all regarded her as their special friend. Bronwen Pugh, even as a student, still lived in the shadow of others – her sisters, the glamorous Virginia McKenna and, within her own circle, Erica.

In Erica – as with Joan Tuker – Bronwen was again drawn to the third of three daughters, though this time there was no hint of romance in their friendship. And like Bronwen, Erica was trying to break the family mould. Her two elder sisters had become doctors. She was determined not to follow in their footsteps. There was, friends remember, something compelling and unusual about Erica. For a start, her family lived in Geneva, where her father taught at the university. She had spent the war years in America and that experience also contributed to her standing out from her peers.

‘She arrived with this American preppy look,’ Diana de Wilton remembers, ‘skirts and jumpers and blouses with little collars. We were all still in twin set and pearls, though under Erica’s influence we soon changed. And she was freer in thought, much more adult. I’d been to a convent where there was no freedom of thought, but Erica would take me to Quaker meetings “to broaden my mind”. I used to worry that I was committing a sin.’ Erica also had a more mature attitude to men than her three friends – all of them straight out of protective all-girl schools. ‘She was freer in her thoughts about boys and sex and those things,’ says Diana de Wilton. ‘Not that any of us were in any way experienced, but she was just less buttoned up. We tried to follow her lead.’ While the other three all lived at home, Erica enjoyed the freedom of her own flat in Golders Green, shared with one of her sisters.

All four – with the possible exception of Erica Pickard – were naive and unworldly in their dealings with men. For Bronwen there would be great romantic crushes that faded before the man in question even realised she was interested. If he then made a move, she would already have passed on to another equally unrequited passion. Men, in general, were regarded as desirable but optional and often little more than a subject of amusement. Alun Pugh’s efforts to introduce his daughter to eminently suitable but sensible young barristers across the dining table at Pilgrims Lane therefore failed to move her. ‘They would always be saying, “Well, what about so-and-so, there’s nothing wrong with him?” One of their candidates became known to us all as “poor Smith” because he was always wanting to take me out and I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that I didn’t want romance, but I had no wish for anything serious, let alone thoughts of marriage.’

Despite being a young eighteen in many ways, she had a clear and unfashionable view that life had to be about more than marriage and settling down. ‘We had men friends, but they were never intense partnerships at all. We’d often swap boyfriends between the four of us. And then we’d drop them really just because we felt like it. It was all very innocent and casual. We were far too inhibited for it to be anything more serious. There was no pill so you didn’t have sex. Nice girls like us didn’t do it for fear of what might happen. If you did then it would be the person you intended marrying and I wasn’t thinking about marriage at all.’ Only later did her father tell her that she had left a trail of broken hearts in the Inns of Court.

Outside hours, the four young women would head off to the coffee bars and salad counters that were just starting to open up in the capital. There they would bury their heads in fashion magazines, planning what dizzy dress-making heights they would aspire to over the weekend with whatever they could get on coupons, though Bronwen now recalls that she invariably looked tatty. In the evenings they frequented the West End theatres – half a crown in the gods and then a long walk home. Laurence Olivier was a particular favourite of all four, while the link with Christopher Fry through Central got them into the first night of his celebrated verse play Ring Round the Moon at the Globe in 1950.

Otherwise there were parties, though Bronwen was twenty before she stayed out all night – at a sleepover at Joan Murray’s. ‘My parents were never strict, but if I was going to be late I’d tell them where I was, whom I was with and when I would get back. I always made sure that I was there on time.’ She began smoking, more because it was the done thing than through any overwhelming addiction, and enjoyed the occasional drink, though seldom to excess. Though she had ambitions to be a free spirit and mould-breaker, the Pughs’ youngest daughter gave her parents few sleepless nights.

The four young friends would often congregate at Pilgrim’s Lane. On one occasion Alun Pugh took his youngest daughter and her friends to court for the day. ‘We had asked him something about the law,’ says Diana de Wilton, ‘and he had then decided we should see what goes on at first hand. He was a very kind man, and charming too, but he could still be a little bit frightening. I remember him asking me what books I liked to read. I was only nineteen and shy and said, “Rebecca”. “Oh,” he said, “can’t you think of anything better than that?” I felt so ashamed.’

The unspoken assumption all through the course at Central was that it would lead to a career in teaching. Towards the end of the final term there was a tour of Home Counties’ schools, with the students producing and performing Companion to a Lady, The Harlequinade and the obscure Second Shepherd’s Play. Bronwen’s role was mostly on the production side.

After passing her final examinations and getting her diploma in June 1951, she turned her mind to finding a job. A selection of vacancies was displayed on the school noticeboard and she got the first post she applied for – at Croft House School, Shillingstone, in Dorset. That enduring lack of planning again played a part in her life for, had she made any preliminary enquiries, she would have realised it was a place to be avoided. Croft House was an odd set-up, run in their home by an eccentric, elderly couple, the Torkingtons, known to their disgruntled staff (for reasons that are now obscure) as Caesar and Pop. Miss Pugh’s classroom was in a greenhouse.

The pupils were all girls and had originally come to Croft House to keep the Torkingtons’ own daughter company as she was educated at home. It had subsequently grown in size but lacked any strong guiding principle beyond keeping its young ladies occupied during the school term. It was certainly not an outstandingly academic environment. When any girl passed her school certificate, it was announced at assembly and everyone clapped in surprise and awe. Such an achievement was something out of the ordinary. More often than not, a pony club rosette was all a girl had to show for five years at Croft House.

To her surprise, Bronwen found she enjoyed teaching. Or she enjoyed working with individual pupils. In front of a class full of disgruntled and unmotivated girls, however, she soon realised that her father’s ambitions for her to be a headmistress were misplaced. ‘My classes ended up uproarious, with me laughing almost as much as the girls. Since as well as teaching drama and voice, I was also their form teacher, I was summoned by the owners and asked to explain my behaviour. They asked how I was going to punish my class. When I suggested one idea, they countered with another. On my plate at the next meal time was my notice.’

Bronwen had lasted a year, by which stage she had become one of the longest-serving teachers. The Torkingtons had a habit of falling out with their staff over money, discipline or their unorthodox but dogmatic approach. Throughout the year she had managed to keep one foot in Dorset and one back in London, shuttling between the two in her car. Though Joan Murray had married the future television and film director Christopher Morahan straight after leaving Central, Bronwen, Erica and Diana would head off in search of adventure.

Once they motored up to Oxford to visit Nigel Buxton, an undergraduate there who had previously been lodging at the house in Pilgrims Lane. Through Buxton, later a successful journalist and travel writer, they were able to taste a little of the Oxford social scene that Bronwen had rejected as part of her decision to go to Central. It led to invitations to summer balls next to the Cherwell and even to Bronwen making such good friends at Oxford that in the summer of 1952 she joined some of them for a holiday in Europe.

When he had been lodging at Pilgrims Lane, Buxton had caught Bronwen’s eye and she had developed quite a crush on him, but by the time she visited him at Oxford her romantic thoughts had, as ever and girlishly, moved on. He, however, was now keen on her, as he confided to Diana de Wilton, but the object of his ardour was now unobtainable. ‘It was typical of me at the time,’ Bronwen now says. ‘I was so very impatient.’

Bronwen spent the Christmas of 1951 in Geneva with the Pickards. She and Erica both admitted to each other that they were disappointed by teaching and feared that they had drifted, unthinkingly, into a career that held little enjoyment for them. So, together, they dreamt up a route to adventure. With their heads buried in fashion magazines, the solution was obvious – be a model girl. It is now a standard teenage fantasy, but in the early 1950s it was an ambitious plan because the status of the model girl was still somewhat dubious. When, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the first mannequins had appeared in Paris, they were little more than glorified shop girls. Certainly it was not a career any bourgeois family would consider suitable for its daughters. ‘At the beginning of the century,’ the designer Pierre Balmain wrote, ‘mannequins were not accepted in society … they were often girls of easy virtue who dined in private rooms at Maxim’s and were slow to take umbrage if followed in the Rue de la Paix.’

Later, however, in the early years of the twentieth century, the advent of the Gibson girls added a new veneer of respectability to the profession. Named after the society artist Charles Dana Gibson, these big-busted, pinch-waisted young women, all with classical hour-glass figures, first featured in his work and later achieved national celebrity as the epitome of feminine beauty. The original Gibson girl – and the artist’s wife – was Irene Langhorne, whose younger sister Nancy was Lady Astor and who therefore became Bronwen’s aunt by marriage. Through Gibson, Irene Langhorne turned the archetypal southern belle into the icon of young American women for almost two decades.

Until the Second World War a slightly seedy pall had continued to hang over the whole business of modelling, especially in Europe, with many of its practitioners rumoured also to be dispensing sexual favours. Only in the late forties and fifties did it become a desirable thing for a well-bred girl to do. This was first and foremost a commercial development. Those selling couture clothes realised that their customers were well-to-do and respectable women who would respond to seeing the garments they were about to purchase shown off by a young woman of the same class and background as themselves.

So Bronwen and Erica were among the first generation of young women able to read in fashion magazines of the glamorous but squeaky-clean lives of well-born and thoroughly upright models like British-born Jean Dawnay or the Americans Dorian Leigh and Suzy Parker, both immortalised by the celebrated fashion photographer Richard Avedon. These women were feted as stars and role models in the Hollywood mould. As Dawnay herself put it, in Paris in this period modelling ‘became an accepted profession, whereas before it was looked down upon as something into which men put their mistresses’. Dawnay, a household name in the early 1950s, set the seal on the new-found respectability of modelling when she married into the European aristocracy and became Princess George Galitzine.

In Erica Pickard’s case there was sufficient charisma and conventional good looks to make a career in modelling more than a pipe dream. ‘She had a lovely face, wonderful features and she was always slim,’ Bronwen remembers. ‘The only thing that marred her was her teeth. They crossed over slightly but we decided they could be sorted out.’ In Bronwen’s case, though, aspiring to be a model was a radical departure. She certainly had a theatrical side that liked performing, but only three years earlier she had lacked the confidence even to try for the actors’ course at Central. And up to this point there had been no hint that either she or anyone in her family regarded her as a great beauty.

Quite the opposite, her former nanny Bella Wells remembers. The orthodox line in the Pugh family remained that Ann was the beauty and Gwyneth the clever one, with Bronwen lost in a no man’s land between the two. Yet there was an obvious appeal in modelling for a young woman who had grown up feeling herself unwanted and who had therefore spent a good deal of energy in encouraging, cajoling and forcing her parents to ‘look at me’. This was attention-seeking turned into an adult profession.

Erica’s encouragement was crucial. According to Bronwen, ‘We never thought it would work, but we would look at the model girls in the magazines, look at ourselves and I would say, “You could do that,” to Erica, and then she would say to me, “And you could too.” It was a game, but slightly more than that – a challenge.’ Erica made Bronwen believe that her wild eyes and strong bone structure could be assets for a model girl, but the same problem that had blocked her path as an actress-her height-also made it seem unlikely that she would succeed in a world where short women were the most highly prized. (Dawnay, for example, was a petite, curvaceous blond.) And there was also the issue of her squint.

Diana de Wilton was another who could see beyond such eventually minor details to glimpse an unconventional beauty in Bronwen. De Wilton in particular was struck by her mannerisms. ‘She had this way of standing and walking. She had poise. When I look at our student photographs she had a way of placing her hands and turning her head that I now see made her a natural for modelling.’

Back in London after the Christmas break, Erica and Bronwen might well have forgotten their dream had they not read of a competition for budding model girls in Vogue. It was a diversion, but, bored by their everyday lives, they went at it wholeheartedly and had their portfolios made up by a high street photographer in Kensington. It was, they knew, a million-to-one shot, and their number did not come up. Modelling was put to one side and there it might have remained but for a tragic accident which changed the course of Bronwen’s life.

Soon after Easter 1952 Erica Pickard was standing on the open platform of a London bus when it swung round a corner. She was reaching over to press the stop bell and lost her grip. She fell out on to the pavement, cracking her skull against the curb as she tumbled. She was rushed to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in a coma. Her friends and family kept up a vigil at her bedside, but three days later she died at the age of just twenty-two.

‘It had a devastating effect on all of us,’ says Diana de Wilton. ‘I can only liken its effect on our group to the effect of Princess Diana’s death on the whole nation. We were used to older people dying, but when someone young, someone you know dies, then you realise your own mortality for the first time.’ For Bronwen it went further. It thrust her overnight into adulthood and precipitated a complete re-evaluation of her life and beliefs.

She was distraught. Of the four friends, she and Erica had grown the closest in the year after leaving Central. ‘I went to the funeral at Golden Green crematorium. When the coffin disappeared behind the screen, I heard this unearthly scream. It took a while for me to realise that it had come from me. I had to go back to school to teach straight away afterwards. One day, six weeks later, at tea I saw this piece of cake on my plate and couldn’t remember taking it. That’s when I realised I had been on auto-pilot. It was as if I had suddenly come round from concussion.’

Physically it may only have taken her six weeks to get over the shock, but the mental turmoil caused by Erica’s death was to remain with her for many years, pushing her ever more in on herself as she struggled to work out what the tragedy had meant. ‘I hadn’t realised that death could be so sudden. I’d lived through the war. I knew that people died. Yet Erica’s death changed everything.’

In coping with her grief, Bronwen turned naturally to the Pickard family. They clutched her to their bosom and tried to persuade her to take over Erica’s London flat in Golders Green and to apply for Erica’s job as a way of escaping the horrors of Dorset. She was reluctant, unwilling to step into the dead girl’s shoes at this vulnerable moment. She had fallen out with the Torkingtons and, if she was to stay in teaching, would need to start looking for another job. Yet she wasn’t sure teaching was for her. She liked one-to-one encounters but hated the classroom. And at least at Croft House School the timetable had been relaxed. Elsewhere the very sides of teaching she disliked the most – the discipline, the regimentation – would loom larger.

More broadly, Erica’s death focused her attention on the monotony of her day-to-day life. Was this how she wanted to spend her time here, however long or short? If she died tomorrow, would she feel fulfilled? Or was she in danger of falling in, after a brief period of rebellion, with the plan mapped out for her by her own family?

She knew she had to make a decision but was unsure which way to turn. The catalyst came from an unexpected quarter. She was invited to dinner by her old tutor from Central, L. A. G. Strong. ‘I said the usual thing, “Why this, why Erica, what now?” And he said, “Why did she choose you as her best friend?” And it was as if a light was turned on. As we talked I mentioned our idea of being model girls. I began to realise that one way to cope with Erica’s death was to follow that dream. She had given me the courage and confidence to try it, she had made me think it was possible. It wasn’t so much that over dinner I thought, “Oh yes, I can be a model girl”; it was that he set me thinking about what inner qualities she had recognised in me and what I should now do with them.’

Much later she was to realise that living out their daydream was a form of grief therapy, a way of blocking out the unanswerable questions that had suddenly descended on her after Erica’s death. Ultimately it was those questions that initiated Bronwen’s conscious spiritual journey, for the loss of her friend touched directly – as no event in her hitherto short life had – on the spiritual dimension that she had long been aware of, but which she had kept carefully hidden away and separated from her student friends and her family. ‘I think my father realised, though we never talked about it. And Gwyneth. But my mother and Ann had no inkling and even if they did, they would have had no sympathy.’ To this day Ann remains resolutely sceptical about Bronwen’s religious experiences.

Bronwen had taken tentative steps to reveal this inner dimension to her friends, knowing that she could no longer keep it bottled up. Leading a double life was, she came to see, unsatisfying. Some of her crowd had been unreceptive. Others had noticed but could not follow it up. Diana de Wilton, for instance, vaguely noted Bronwen’s tendency, whenever performing a passage for voice-training at Central, to choose something spiritual, like a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. Yet she was never taken into Bronwen’s confidence.

On the surface there were few other clues. As a student Bronwen drifted away from any sort of formal church attendance. What she had experienced, she convinced herself, had little to do with organised religion. But with Erica it was different. ‘From the very start, all my insights into this parallel world had been about love – ‘Only love matters” is what I had heard that first time at the birthday party when I was seven. And it was so painful when Erica died, that I thought I had to stop loving. But equally I knew I couldn’t harden my heart. For a while I just shut down. That was my way of coping.’

And she might have remained ‘shut down’, closed to this other world, perhaps for ever, had not her meeting with L. A. G. Strong prompted her to follow her heart. Having a go at modelling became a small part of what was ultimately a wider liberation and discarding of conventional restraints that helped to form her later self. It was the outward sign that something had changed within her, but she did not know quite what for another eight years. Modelling gave her the space to find out.

Although hitherto she had had little inclination for books, after Erica’s death Bronwen became an uninhibited and often daring reader, working her way through a constant stream of sometimes enlightening and some disappointing texts – history, fiction, science, religion, psychology. Occasionally in the course of her life she has come across a book that has changed the way she thinks or opened up another perspective. Having, by her own choice, missed out on a university education, she has taught herself through books.

She was introduced to the writings of Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1874–1949) and his sometime disciple Peter Demianovitch Ouspensky (1879–1947). Both had died recently and she was directed to them, casually, by someone she met at a party. ‘You can imagine what I was like at parties then, very intense, always wanting to talk about ideas and only interested in people if they had something interesting to say.’

In the late 1940s and early 1950s among a younger generation of readers reacting, it has subsequently been suggested, to the recent world war with an abnormal degree of introspection and an over-eager and sometimes naive search for alternative paths, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky achieved the sort of cult status later enjoyed by Indian mystics in the sixties. They were, for Bronwen and many others in that period, a revelation and a first introduction to psychology.

Both were Russian, though Gurdjieff had Greek parents. Both were fascinated by the occult and experiments to prove that magic had an objective worth. But their enduring influence – certainly in Bronwen’s life – was their emphasis on the need for each individual to develop psychological insights in order to grow into a new state of higher consciousness. Such insights, she came to believe, could bridge the gap between her everyday world and the spiritual world she had glimpsed.

About Gurdjieff himself opinions were divided, even in his lifetime. His supporters – who included the New Zealand-born short-story writer, Katherine Mansfield – regarded him as a prophet and philosopher without equal. Kenneth Walker, a writer who was one of many who were drawn to the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainbleau, described its leader as ‘the arch disturber of self-complacency’, but the press at the time and historians subsequently have judged Gurdjieff less kindly. R. B. Woodings, the distinguished chronicler of twentieth-century thought, sums him up thus: ‘His ideas are not original, his sources can be readily traced and the movement he stimulated was obviously part of reawakening of interest in the occult in the earlier part of this century.’ However, Woodings is in no doubt about the impact of Gurdjieff. ‘Whether charlatan, mystic, scoundrel or “master”, he exercised remarkable authority charismatically over his disciples and by reputation over much wider American and European circles.’

Ouspensky – for nine years until 1924 Gurdjieff’s self-appointed ‘aposde’ – was no less popular and now enjoys a little more academic credibility. Again he inspired a cult-like following, based on his estate at Virginia Water in Surrey, but he had a sounder grasp of philosophy than Gurdjieff and had studied both mathematics and Nietzsche before dabbling in the occult and theosophy, the belief system promoted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by his fellow Russian Helena Blavatsky and her American associate, Henry Steele Olcott, which embraced Hindu ideas of karma and reincarnation.

And it was Ouspensky who made the greater impact on Bronwen. His The Fourth Way, published soon after his death in 1947, brought together many of the ideas he had relentlessly explored in his lifetime. It introduced Bronwen to eastern thought, which she found considerably more attractive than Christianity, and it described in detail his ‘system’ for greater self-knowledge and enlightenment. ‘The chief idea of this system,’ he wrote, ‘was that we do not use even a small part of our powers and forces. We have in us, a very big and very fine organisation, only we do not know how to use it.’ The idea, then, was to study oneself, following Ouspensky’s guidance.

This ranged from the mundane to the enlightening to the foolish. ‘We are divided,’ he claimed, ‘into hundreds and thousands of different “I”s. At one moment when I say “I”, one part of me is speaking, at another moment when I say “I” it is quite another “I” speaking. We do not know that we have not one “I”, but many different “I”s connected with our feelings and desires and have no controlling “I”. These “I”s change all the time; one suppresses another, one replaces another, and all this struggle makes up our inner life.’

To a young, impressionable woman who felt herself torn between the material and spiritual parts of her life, such ideas appeared attractive. She had already realised that she had two apparently contradictory impulses pushing her forward. One was the outgoing, fun-loving, meet-any-challenge, sporty side that was now drawing her to modelling. The other – a legacy, she was sure, from her Welsh ancestors – was driven by a solitary, contemplative, inward-looking instinct that made her want to run away from the world, curl up in a ball and search through books and thought for an answer to why Erica had died in such a tragic way. Ouspensky helped her at least to recognise these two faces within herself and gave her clues as to their origins.

When later he talked about the ‘negative emotions’ bequeathed by childhood and parents and the need to confront these in order to move to a higher level of consciousness, Ouspensky was speaking directly to Bronwen’s own experience, but it would be a mistake to imagine that she became any sort of convert to his cult. She was enthusiastic about her introduction to psychology and to discussions of levels of consciousness – Ouspensky declared there were four – and she was heartened to know that others too were struggling with the sort of questions she had hitherto tackled in secret and largely alone, but Ouspensky was simply a starting point.

In the light of her subsequent determination to combine psychological insights with organised religion – though of course at this time she was a lapsed Anglican – Ouspensky’s antipathy to belief should be noted. Despite borrowing from eastern and western religious creeds, Ouspensky boasted that his system ‘teaches people to believe in absolutely nothing. You must verify everything that you see, hear or feel.’ And some of the conclusions to which he took initially attractive ideas appeared ridiculous, even to one as inexperienced and naive as Bronwen at that stage. His theories about the effect of earthly vibrations on the mind and his peculiar mathematical tangle, ‘the ray of Creation’, ascribing numerically quantified ‘forces’ to a series of worlds (which themselves were listed from one to ninety-six) must have been difficult for even the most avid follower to swallow.

Yet Ouspensky and Gurdjieff initiated a search for a complementary psychological and spiritual framework that has since dominated Bronwen’s life. In her student days and as she took her first faltering steps into the adult world of work, the two principal elements within her and hence in her story began to unravel – the spiritual and the material. At the same time as she was setting her sights on the flimsy, fun and throwaway world of model girls, with their jetset lifestyles, headline-grabbing antics and aristocratic suitors, she embarked on a lonely and often painful journey to understand her own psyche and soul.

* In a recent similar case in Egypt, reported in British medical journals, a sixteen-year-old builder went to see his doctor with severe stomach pains. An X-ray revealed a swollen sac pressing against his kidneys and containing his unborn twin, a seven-inch long foetus, weighing more than four pounds. It had a head, an arm, a tongue and teeth. Like an incubus it had been surviving inside the sixteen-year-old, feeding off him.