The Blue Touch Paper by David Hare Read Free Book Online Page A

aristocracy. A second company played Devonshire Gardens during the summer season. In 1957, the company presented a total of forty-seven plays – over twice as many as now offered annually by our National Theatre. From time to time their undemanding repertory of thrillers, light comedies and farces was stretched to include work by Anouilh, Sheridan, Wilde, Maugham, J. B. Priestley, Arthur Miller, Ugo Betti and Graham Greene. Both theatres had ashtrays on every seat so any children attending could complete a full day’s passive smoking. The Penguin Players were run by a married couple, Richard Burnett and Peggy Paige, while their juvenile leads, Vilma Hollingbery and Michael Napier Brown, also shared a bed. Even Donald Wolfit and his wife Rosalind Iden came visiting with a Shakespearian programme whichended ominously with the ham actor threatening to reward our response by doing the whole thing again. ‘But Time, the great master, calls,’ he added, to the relief of all. For music, we could go to concerts in the White Rock Pavilion in Hastings. For films, there was a choice of three cinemas in Bexhill, and a further five within a few miles.
    John had a deeply romantic view of art. It was about access to massive, mysterious forces, it was about greatness. But he also had a faiblesse , which I shared, for all the hick little black-and-white comedies, a lot of them starring Peter Sellers, which presented adult Britons as petty, posturing and ridiculous. The only response any halfway sensitive person could have to British life in the 1950s was to laugh at it. Meanwhile, a lot of the stuff we saw from the Penguins, he told me, was not very good. This was a weekly rep, after all. Rehearsals were just line-learning. The actors provided their own costumes from a travelling trunk which had to include dinner dress and a police uniform. But Mr G_____ also told me that you could sometimes learn as much from bad theatre as from good. I had no intimation that this was a proposition I would test to destruction in the coming years.
    This period of my life probably lasted a few months, and made me uneasy. It was clear to other boys at school that Mr G____ had moved his attentions to me, and the response was a mixture of mockery and jealousy. Keith Lamdin, on the other hand, was glowing with relief that the spotlight was no longer on him. But again, as so often in later life when I appeared in other people’s eyes to be receiving more than my fair share of favours, I had no reason to be disloyal. Far from it. This man was opening my eyes and ears to all the things which were most interesting to me. Why on earth would I object to that? Each time we went out – a man in his mid-twenties accompanied bya boy aged eleven – I had to ask permission from my mother, which at all times she automatically gave. The plan one Saturday afternoon was that we should drive in Mr G____’s car to Hastings to see Our Man in Havana , a Carol Reed picture with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward. We were both looking forward to it. But this time, when I asked her, Mum unexpectedly refused. She was standing at the sink, and I was in the kitchen behind her, when she went on to say that it was wrong for me to take so much from Mr G____. I said that there was nothing wrong in our friendship. He was simply being kind. My mother replied, in a tone which brooked no argument, ‘Mr G____ has been kind enough.’
    It was, you may say, a perfectly pitched Bexhill remark. It was loaded with insinuation but at the same time free of it. To this day, I can’t tell whether Mum truly disapproved of my teacher’s generosity – nobody should be unusually kind – or, more likely, suspected the motive for it. All I knew was that there was no way past it. It was, I think, one of only two or three times I ever heard my mother say anything which was completely final. People who rarely lay down the law have a special authority when they do.