This time round, the German and Dutch borders were passed safely and we pulled into Rotterdam with time in hand to make the Channel ferry. The rest of our journey thankfully passed uneventfully (except for both children throwing up into the Channel during the crossing).
Autumn came all too quickly in 1961. Hamish started grammar school, we celebrated Kirsty’s second birthday in October and I returned part-time to the theatre as a choreographer. Wolf Mankowitz’s play Make Me an Offer was in production, with Daniel Massey and Dilys Laye in the cast. When it transferred to the New Theatre, Frank Norman’s Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be followed, and then William Saroyan’s Sam the Highest Jumper of Them All.
Kirsty was meanwhile developing something of a free spirit. My middle-aged baby minder, Suzanne, was very concerned when she took Kirsty to the park and the child ran off such a long way that she had been afraid of losing her. I took Kirsty to the same park, telling her not to run away. When she saw a young priest sitting on a nearby bench with a book on his lap, she toddled over to him, climbed companionably onto the seat beside him and politely asked him what he was reading. Whether he was shy, preoccupied, or simply absorbed in his studies, I just don’t know, but he scrupulously ignored her and his eyes remained glued to the book. I went over to take her away.
‘Mummy,’ she said loudly, looking at his book with great interest, ‘this man won’t tell me what he is reading.’ It wasn’t that she was upset at being ignored so thoroughly: she was just curious to know, at the age of two or three, what was interesting him so much in the book.
After being quite poorly with measles, Kirsty developed a chest infection and I rushed her to hospital. I was not prepared to wait and told the probationer she had to fetch the doctor immediately. She picked up the phone, slightly tentatively since she knew that she would be interrupting the doctor’s lunch. In a few moments a young doctor came hurrying towards me, wiping his mouth with his hand. He gave Kirsty a quick examination, and then turned to me.
‘You have a very sick little girl here,’ he said. It was clear what he was trying to tell me, but I refused to acknowledge the implications. I just stood there silently, willing him to do something.
Kirsty was put in an oxygen tent and the nurse kindly found a camp-bed for me in another part of the hospital. I made the short trip to and from Kirsty’s bed throughout the night, on one occasion asking her how she felt.
‘Fine,’ she replied, though I’m not sure she was. But the infection cleared up in due course and she returned home.
I read to Kirsty most days before I left her in the morning and usually left the story at a particularly exciting part, promising to finish it when I got back. When I returned one day and said I would finish reading her the story, Kirsty looked at me with some slight annoyance. ‘Well, I’ve read it now, haven’t I?’ she said. She was well aware of my ruse, but I don’t remember her ever actually being taught to read.
Kirsty’s lifelong friend Sasha, the daughter of my friend Denise, would also come over and read to her as she was still confined to bed. She was only four years older than Kirsty and had a wonderful bedside manner, picking up the book and saying ‘Well now, where have we got to?’ I would arrange a bedside tray of delicacies – little sandwiches, and perhaps a small chocolate cake decorated on the top with crystallised violets. This was to thank Sasha, but I also hoped that Kirsty would eat something, though her appetite was poor and I was lucky if she ate a sandwich.
As I came to collect the tray one afternoon, I overheard the following conversation.
‘What does your Daddy do?’ asked Sasha.
‘He’s a folk singer,’ replied Kirsty. ‘What does yours do?’
‘Oh! He’s at university,’ said Sasha, in a rather lordly manner.
‘Yes, I know,’said Kirsty, ‘but what will he do when he grows up?’
It was decided that Kirsty should go into hospital for a series of tests, and on one of my visits I was told she could come home the next day. The results would be sent to my GP. As I left a cheerful-sounding Kirsty, I noticed an open window behind her bed and my instinct was to close it for fear of draughts. Not wishing to appear a paranoid parent, though, I did nothing. Next day, as I was parking my car, I saw Judy Rapoport coming down the hospital steps from the ward, tears streaming down her face. She told me she had never seen Kirsty so depressed. It seems she had caught cold and would not now be leaving. She had also been given a grey skirt to wear which made her feel, she said, ‘like a grey elephant’. She at last came home a couple of days later, but I did feel guilty about that open window.
Ewan visited as usual during these difficult months, but was unable to offer any practical help. I was pleased that he took Hamish out on trips, but to Kirsty, at this age, he remained a stranger. When he came one day, she even asked, ‘Who is this man?’
On my birthday Hamish came home and banged on the front door as he couldn’t open it himself: he was carrying a huge bunch of flowers, and a package which seemed to be caught up in his schoolbag. Both were for me. I unwrapped the package, and discovered that it contained a half-bottle of gin. He had gone into the off-licence and said that it was his mother’s birthday and the manager recommended the gin. I sometimes wonder if he thought his mother was an alcoholic.
In 1963 I was working on Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War and teaching movement at the East 15 Acting School. Although the journey between Croydon and Stratford East was long, I generally managed to get home in the early afternoon. My mother had moved to live nearby and she and Kirsty got on very well. But there was still a great deal to do. Hamish had out-of-school activities and homework. I would prepare an early evening meal and then get on with the daily domestic chores, washing, ironing and so on.
Hamish would often get hungry again later so I taught him how to cook simple meals for himself. This seemed to work perfectly, and our evenings were frequently filled with the aroma of some new delicacy the chef had cooked up. And when I came into the kitchen in the morning there wasn’t even any washing up to do. After a few days of this perfect arrangement, however, I began to notice I was running short of pots and pans – they were nowhere to be found. Then I had the bright idea of looking under Hamish’s bed and the mystery was solved!
One day at around this time Joan treated Kirsty and me to the ballet to see Cinderella: it was Kirsty’s first visit to the theatre. We sat in the front row of the dress circle. Kirsty was very quiet until the interval, and as the lights came up she looked around her with interest. At the start of the second half, when Cinderella was distraught at the thought of losing her prince, a small clear voice pronounced clearly, ‘Hamish is a naughty boy.’ It had broken the silence in the auditorium and then everybody in the dress circle tried to suppress their laughter. I was about to suggest she might like to leave, but she was happily absorbed in the ballet again.
Joan’s birthday was very close to Kirsty’s and the three of us were usually together during Joan’s celebrations at her house in Blackheath. The singer Alma Cogan was at one of these parties, I remember, which she had attended with Lionel Bart. She was wearing a glittering dress, very tight-fitting at the waist and with a voluminous skirt: Kirsty was most impressed by that dress.
Summer came, and Ewan said there were still further royalties due to him in Poland and suggested we once again take advantage of George and Anna’s hospitality. They were looking forward to our visit. Anna had a cook and apart from anything else, I knew it would be a real holiday for all of us, with country walks, collecting wild strawberries – and a huge library with many English books for Hamish to enjoy. He had been disappointed when the new form library in his school opened because he had already read every book in it, so each week he was given money by his teacher to buy an addition on approval. We had all enjoyed our last visit and, politically, things had eased in the last two years – at least as far as travelling was concerned.
When the woman sitting next to Kirsty in our compartment asked