A Taste of Temporary Accommodation
Temporary Accommodation
Chapter 1
The houses on Rington Road all look the same. A front door and a bow window downstairs; two narrow windows upstairs. The front doors open onto a tiny front garden, which barely reaches out further than the sill of the bay window. The gardens are bordered by a brick wall and a gate, where the narrow flagged path from the front door terminates. Nothing much grows here, only a smattering of London Pride. Solid rows of bricks on either side of the street funnel a cold wind that comes off the Thames.
Mrs Lavender Bidder and her lodger, Miss Marigold Walbrook, live at number 45. Marigold is a lodger in the legal sense, anyway. But to the widowed and now childless Mrs Bidder, the daughter of her late sister’s neighbour counts as family. Marigold has the best bedroom at the front of the house for a very reasonable rent. Each evening, after her stage performance has been dissected over a shared bottle of Bass beer, she lets herself into the still hallway and directly creaks her way up the stairs. She must double back on herself to reach her bedroom when on the landing, and as she does so, she always hears Mrs Bidder roll over and sigh into her creaky old mattress. Marigold closes her door and switches her lamp on, then immediately lets the day flow into the pages of her diary. This unravelling is the only way that she can shin down from the heights of the safety curtain, to sleep well enough to rise up and learn her lines for next week’s play.
Her diaries are not hidden away at the bottom of her knicker drawer. They line a shelf below the window ledge, inviting Mrs Bidder to dip into them. She has certainly done so from time to time, not out of malice, only boredom mixed with curiosity. Nobody is perfect after all, and those evenings that Marigold spends on stage can be long and empty. It is easy to get tired of the radio. Even though a read diary is always replaced meticulously, Marigold wouldn’t really care if it was left open on top of the shelf and a discussion of the contents initiated directly. She knows that her diaries are read from the sudden questions that she is asked about her past. But her history is neither scandalous nor snide, and as she has chosen her career of pretending to be other people, there isn’t a great deal left of herself to put in it. Even when she broke from acting to be a Land Girl she acted the part of pastoral accomplishment to contain the exhaustion that she felt.
Marigold’s row of diaries get thinner and scrappier as you let your eye travel along them. This rationing of paper that she experienced didn’t mean that her need to write things down underwent any streamlining. Her mother had spent much of her 1940s seeking out notebooks for her daughter to gift on birthdays and Christmas days. But each volume has one thing in common- there will be a page that the journal falls open at, naturally. One that Marigold herself has returned to herself on numerous occasions to relive. Take off each journal in turn, let it fall open at the natural point and place it on the floor. You will have the pertinent points of Marigold’s life. The small and creamy book that contains her first serious writings automatically falls open somewhere in 1934. The line of this page can even be made out when the book is closed, so often has it been referred to by the author.
Miss Baylis spoke to me today! If I had any religion in me I would call her a saint. She is a second mother to us all. I am to leave the students behind now and I have a small part in ‘A Comedy of Errors.’ Miss Baylis told me that the producer was taking a risk and that I was to be very grateful to him and work hard. “You won’t let us down, will you dear?” she said to me. Of course I won’t, I’d sooner remove my legs. Thorley is in it too. He’s going to Manchester after, to do some Rep there. I hope that this is the start of lots of travel for me too. I feel like I could be on every stage in every city!
A couple of years later, the peak troughs down as a similarly bound diary falls open at the page where the death of her heroine is set out.
When Miss W called us all onto the stage, we thought that she’s been delegated to tell us all off for something that we’d done wrong. It crossed my mind about that sandwich that disappeared and the mice. But it was Miss B, who had died in the night. How can the Vic carry on? It won’t be The Old Vic without Lilian Baylis at the controls. She was it. I wanted to stand and ask for the chance to take her place but they would never let me do it. I like to think that she could still have a say from the heaven she must surely be in, she would tell them to give me a chance. That’s what she was all for. I want to remember how I feel today forever – never forget how she kept on and believed in what she was doing. If I ever really get on, I will make a big donation to the Vic in her memory.
But then the journals slimmed down as paper got thinner and scarcer. The next, a mere floppy exercise book, documents the Blitz and Marigold’s call up. She first joined ENSA with her friend Thorley. They performed on Salisbury Plain, then Marigold went on a tour of factories, full of workers who were too tired to fully appreciate talent and culture when they saw it. She tired of it all, and of the billets and lecherous men who had the wrong idea about actresses.
I have decided to join the Land Army. I’ve seen a side to all this business that I’m not so keen on. I want so much to make sure that we don’t forget things that are important, like plays and paintings and stories. But there are others doing this seemingly a lot better than I am. Sometimes I wonder if I should turn to writing plays. Now that I know all about stagecraft and I have stories that sometimes flit through my head. But perhaps I need to remove myself for a while. I am selfish, the war goes on, people die and families are broken up but I’m carrying on nearly as normal and thinking about my career. So now I will do something proper for the war and something that will please my father. Of course a gardener’s daughter should be helping to dig and plant food. I’ll go and work on a farm. Go home now and again and talk about it and while my body works my head can think about stories and staging.
This is what Marigold did for three, four years. Although she was too exhausted to write anything but scrappy entries in her diaries. Sometimes there are notes on possible theatrical scenarios that defy understanding at a distance in time. Then, in 1944, an exercise book with a thin cover torn away from its rusty staple tells a longer story, written a little while after the events that they record.
I must write down what happened. Because I worry that I won’t remember all sorts of things about them and remembering starts with how it ended.
Mr Hartley came to me in the field and told me. He said I was allowed some time off to sort things out. Not that there was much left to sort. Nothing of our home or our belongings. It was just the funerals. The most horrible thing was realising that the photographs would be gone so I can’t even look at them anymore.
I got the train home. It was crowded full and I must have been sick out of the window in the carriage door three times. There was such a kind pair of sailors stood next to me all the way down. They asked me what was wrong, a bit jokey at first but when I told them they looked after me like brothers. I wish I’d asked them for their names now so I could write and thank them. Although if they started writing back I’d have constant reminders coming through the letterbox of that most terrible journey.
When I got there, I realised I had nowhere to stay, nowhere to put my bag while I went about the business. I went straight home anyway, just to see for myself. Perhaps there had been a mix up, perhaps the rocket had landed on Beeches Road instead of Beeches Avenue. But there was my home, a pocket of fresh air in the row of houses, ours gone and the one next door – Mr and Mrs Parker with it. What I’ll always have in my mind is the front gate. There is was, still painted green and fastened to the gate post. Not a thing wrong with it. I opened it and then sat on the little step, wondering what I should do next. I suppose I thought that if I sat there long enough, somebody official might turn up and tell me. Or perhaps I had already been told what to do and I hadn’t been listening properly. I decided that I’d better have a good think. I sat myself down and the step crumbled a little bit under my weight. Then within two minutes Mr Amos was hovering over me, telling me that I must pull myself together and take myself off to the Town Hall where I would be directed to the right people to sort me out. But then Mrs Bidder turned up. I didn’t know her name or who she was at first, but then she explained that she was Mrs Parker’s sister and I thought that I had seen her visiting them. For some reason I had a vision of her sitting in a deck chair on the Parker’s back lawn, eating peach slices from a china dish. It made me smile at her, and she smiled back in the same way. We were rather grateful to each other for turning up at the same time. We found out that we’d been on the same train but it had just taken her a bit longer to get to the house. I remember she said to me
“I had to see it for myself. It doesn’t matter how much they tell you, until you’ve seen it for yourself you just can’t believe it, can you?”
Either one of us could have said it. So I was hopeful that she would go through it all with me because she was so comfortable. There was a nice big expanse of her to soak up my troubles. We walked on to the Town Hall together and found out that we were both left alone in the world by that rocket. It seemed silly to part ways after that.
Mrs Bidder herself has read that passage more than once and it has made her determined to be a mother to Marigold, despite the bit about her big expanse. Once the funerals of the Walbrooks and the Parkers had taken place, there was no reason for them both to stay together, but Mrs Bidder offered her best bedroom to Marigold and she accepted it. First she went to stay there on her leaves from the Land Army. Then afterwards she became the lodger as she sought to re-establish herself in a profession that she had never really been established in to begin with. A South London repertory theatre took her on, and she repaid them with a fund of anecdotes about Lilian Baylis.
Mrs Bidder didn’t keep a diary. She sewed instead. She had merely decorated the photograph frames of her husband and son instead of writing about them. Now that she had Marigold, she had costumes to sew. Seeing the theatre from the back of the stage had put her mind at rest regarding the moral background of her adoptee. Stage types weren’t so bad as some folks made out, she decided. And they took to her, called her “Old Ma” and poured her cups of tea. She always drunk them whether she wanted them or not, just to prove that she was no staid Victorian matron.
This is where we find Marigold Walbrook and Lavender Bidder; just with each other, wondering where the post war world would lead them, a bit tired already of the costume changes that life had given them.
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