My Autobiography

was charming and tender and would kiss her good-night before leaving for the theatre. And on a Sunday morning, when he had not been drinking, he would breakfast with us and tell Louise about the vaudeville acts that were working with him, and have us all enthralled. I would watch him like a hawk, absorbing every action. In a playful mood, he once wrapped a towel round his head and chased his little son around the table, saying: ‘I’m King Turkey Rhubarb.’
About eight o’clock in the evening, before departing for the theatre, he would swallow six raw eggs in port wine, rarely eating solid food. That was all that sustained him day after day. He seldom came home, and, if he did, it was to sleep off his drinking.
One day Louise received a visit from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and she was most indignant about it. They came because the police had reported finding Sydney and me asleep at three o’clock in the morning by a watchman’s fire. It was a night that Louise had shut us both out, and the police had made her open the door and let us in.
A few days later, however, while Father was playing in the provinces, Louise received a letter announcing that Mother had left the asylum. A day or two later the landlady came up and announced that there was a lady at the front door to call for Sydney and Charlie. ‘There’s your mother,’ said Louise. There was a momentary confusion. Then Sydney leaped downstairs into her arms, I following. It was the same sweet, smiling Mother who affectionately embraced us.
Louise and Mother were too embarrassed to meet, so Mother waited at the front door while Sydney and I collected our things. There was no umbrage or ill-feeling on either side – in fact, Louise’s manner was most agreeable, even to Sydney when she bade him good-bye.
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Mother had taken a room in one of the back streets behind Kennington Cross near Hayward’s pickle factory, and the acid smell would start up every afternoon. But the room was cheap and we were all together again. Mother’s health was excellent, and the thought that she had been ill never entered our heads.
How we lived through this period I have not the remotest idea. Nonetheless, I remember no undue hardships or insoluble problems. Father’s payments of ten shillings a week were almost regular, and, of course, Mother took up her needlework again and renewed her contact with the church.
An incident stands out at that period. At the end of our street was a slaughter-house, and sheep would pass our house on their way to be butchered. I remember one escaped and ran down the street to the amusement of onlookers. Some tried to grab it and others tripped over themselves. I had giggled with delight at its lambent capering and panic, it seemed so comic. But when it was caught and carried back into the slaughter-house, the reality of the tragedy came over me and I ran indoors, screaming and weeping to Mother: ‘They’re going to kill it! They’re going to kill it!’ That stark, spring afternoon and that comedy chase stayed with me for days; and I wonder if that episode did not establish the premise of my future films – the combination of the tragic and the comic.
School was now the beginning of new horizons: history, poetry and science. But some of the subjects were prosaic and dull, especially arithmetic: its addition and subtraction gave an image of a clerk and a cash register, its use, at best, a protection against being short-changed.
History was a record of wickedness and violence, a continual succession of regicides and kings murdering their wives, brothers and nephews; geography merely maps; poetry nothing more than exercising memory. Education bewildered me with knowledge and facts in which I was only mildly interested.
If only someone had used salesmanship, had read a stimulating preface to each study that could have titillated my mind, infused me with fancy instead of facts, amused and intrigued me with the legerdemain of numbers, romanticized maps, given me a point of view about history and taught me the music of poetry, I might have become a scholar.
Since Mother had returned to us she had begun to stimulate my interest in the theatre again. She imbued me with the feeling that I had some sort of talent. But it was not until those weeks before Christmas when the school put on its cantata Cinderella that I felt an urge to express all that Mother had taught me. For some reason I was not selected to play in it, and inwardly I was envious and felt that I was better able to play in the cantata than those who had been chosen. I was critical of the dull, unimaginative way the boys played their parts. The Ugly Sisters had no zest or comic spirit. They spoke their lines eruditely with a schoolboy inflection and an embarrassing falsetto emphasis. How I would have loved to play one of the Ugly Sisters, with the tutoring Mother could have given me! I was, however, captivated by the girl who played Cinderella. She was beautiful, refined, aged about fourteen, and I was secretly in love with her. But she was beyond my reach both socially and in years.
When I saw the cantata, I thought it dismal but for the beauty of the girl, which left me a little sad. Little did I realize, however, the glorious triumph I was to enjoy two months later when I was brought before each class and made to recite Miss Priscilla’s Cat. It was a comedy recitation Mother had seen outside a newspaper shop and thought so funny that she copied it from the window and brought it home. During a recess in class, I recited it to one of the boys. Mr Reid, our school-teacher, looked up from his work and was so amused that when the class assembled