Alan Rickman by Maureen Paton Read Free Book Online Page A

lucky start in life that money couldn’t buy, since his local state infants’ school just happened to be the only purpose-built Montessori school in Britain.
    Officially opened in 1937, the building was designed on open-air lines with each classroom leading to a glass-roofed verandah. It followed the pioneering principles of the Italian educationalist, Dr Maria Montessori, in encouraging each child to learn and develop at its own individual rate with ‘instructive play’.
    To the traditional curriculum of the three Rs were added such social skills as self-expression – vital for a future actor – charity work and consideration for others plus classes in music, movement and dance, singing, craft, art, cookery, gardening, nature study and basic science, poetry and physical education.
    At the age of four and a half, on 13 September 1950, Alan enrolled at what is now West Acton First School in nearby Noel Road. Play areas were dotted with flower gardens on a five-acre site.
    The school served the new residential roads near Western Avenue plus the adjacent garden estate that had been built between the wars by the then Great Western Railway Company to house its workers.
    In 1995 I went to meet the headmistress Wendy Dixon, who called the first school ‘. . . the seed-bed, which biographers so often ignore.
    â€˜Alan had a big advantage at the very beginning in going to a Montessori school, because visitors came from all over the world to monitor its progress. So children would always be presenting themselves in front of an audience,’ she explained. ‘They were making history all the time: they would have become quite sophisticated. You can always recognise a Montessori-educated adult: they have inquiring minds and a sense of wonder. They’re not just chalked and talked like the rest.’
    â€˜The Montessori method gives a precociousness,’ agrees the playwright Robert Holman, another of Rickman’s long-standing friends. And Alan was a very precocious child.
    His first acting experience came with
The Story of Christmas
on 12 December 1951, a short Nativity play and carol service ‘for the mothers’ as the school diary notes. Fathers were not invited; this was an afternoon performance when the men were deemed to be at work. Two years later, he first felt what he was to describe as the acting ‘sensation’ when he starred in the school play
King Grizzly Bear
(eat your heart out, Sheriff of Nottingham). At the age of seven, Alan Rickman had already made the crucial discovery that he could dominate an audience.
    With low-ceilinged classrooms giving an inspirational view of the sky, plenty of fresh air in outdoor activities and the beginning of what is now known as ‘child-centred education’, this was a creative hothouse far removed from the high-ceilinged, daunting Victorian schoolhouse tradition that was still the norm across the country.
    One very large window that reached to the floor enabled Alan and his classmates to step over the sill and straight into one of several playgrounds. There were no barriers to the outside world in this enlightened child-friendly environment that encouraged pupils to feel in control of their lives. Or, as Dr Montessori wrote: ‘Education must be a help to life . . . and at this period of growth (3–5 years) should be based on the principle of freely chosen activity in a specially prepared environment.’
    Rickman’s future partner, Rima Horton, was to be equally fortunate in the early years. She went to an old-fashioned dame school, St Vincent’s in Holland Park Avenue, which was run by an enlightened mother and daughter team, Mrs Reid and Mrs Bromley. Despite its name – St Vincent de Paul was the revered ‘people’s priest’ who founded the charitable Orders of the Dazarists and the Sisters of Charity – it was not a Catholic school.
    An old classmate remembers