Alan Rickman by Maureen Paton Read Free Book Online Page B

Rima as ‘a very bright kid, a clever girl. She was the elfin type, petite but feisty. My mother said, “What a pretty little girl she is.” There were only 40 in the school. It was very strict, with very good teaching – we would parse sentences and read Shakespeare from an early age, or there would be a rap over the knuckles.
    â€˜Mrs Reid and Mrs Bromley were incredibly intellectual women. We were all protected from the outside world in that school; it was a haven. It was co-educational, but they cared a lot about girls being educated to the same level as boys.
    â€˜It was fee-paying, but not terribly expensive. A lot of the parents were struggling actors or musicians. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Mrs Bromley had allowed some of them to postpone payment if they got into difficulties.
    â€˜They took on children they liked; and they liked real characters. Rima was always a character. We did a lot of theatre; I remember a production of
Dick Whittington
at the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate.
    â€˜Children were allowed to speak for themselves, and Rima always did that. We were brought up to be clever. The school really stood us in good stead. We were encouraged to be independent. Rima and I and a small pack would roam the streets at lunch-time; we had one fight with a posh primary school in Holland Park when the kids were making fun of our red blazers. We punched them in the playground; I remember it was snowing in the park.
    â€˜I was delighted to hear about Alan years later; they make a good couple. He’s got to be the ultimate grown-up crumpet. I don’t mind that his teeth aren’t perfect, there’s something so magnetic about him. He’s just a fascinating man, he seems so warm and clever. You feel he’s going to be fun. He’s divine with children, they adore him.’
    In 1953, at the age of seven, the future grown-up crumpet automatically transferred from West Acton to Derwentwater Junior School. There he won a scholarship in 1957 to the boys’ independent day school Latymer Upper, the Alma Mater of fellow actors Hugh Grant, Mel Smith, Christopher and Dominic Guard and breakfast TV doctor, Hillary Jones, exposed as a two-timer by the tabloids. Old Latymerians are never dull.
    Alan was born with the distinctive ‘Syrup of Figs’ drawl, as one friend calls it, but the emollient private-school accent was createdat Latymer Upper in Hammersmith’s King Street. The process of detachment from his past had begun.
    The first school established by the Latymer Foundation of 1624 was in Fulham churchyard. In 1648 it moved to Hammersmith, but a new school was built in 1863. On the present site, the warm red nineteenth-century brick and the gables give Latymer a cloistered, rarefied atmosphere that comes as a welcome relief from the traffic of the highly commercial King Street.
    Concerts take place in a long vaulted hall with stained-glass windows. Tranquil lawns lead via the adjacent prep school to the River Thames: in 1957, a child from a council estate must have felt as if he were entering the rarefied realms of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
    The school has its own boathouse on the tideway, giving direct river access. In the summer months, outdoor life revolves around cricket, athletics, rowing and tennis.
    The public floggings that one pre-war pupil, John Prebble, remembers had long been abolished. Each boy was assigned a personal tutor, responsible for his development and general welfare. With someone watching over him, Latymer Upper was to be an academic and dramatic Arcadia for the young Alan Rickman.
    Here was a chance to put into practice – and how – the latent exhibitionism that was a vital component in the makeup of every passive-aggressive personality. The word ‘latent’ is the key to Alan’s equivocal attitude towards the Press.
    A perfectionist such as Rickman still resents the way in which, because of the