Madame Galina's Doings Diary

James And The Killer's Peach

Sorry…sorry…sorry I haven’t written for such a long time. I’ve been in Aldeburgh with bronchitis and stomach bug working with genius James Fisher, aka Rupert’s Little Brother, on his radio show.

See the resemblance?

In each weekly show James chooses something to rant about. Last week, it was the Aldeburgh post mistress getting above herself.

“It’s this bigger stamp business”, James explained. “I go in there with fifteen job applications to post, and she says I haven’t folded the bit of A4 paper neatly enough inside the envelopes so they’re puffed-up and won’t fit in the cheap slot. And as she’s trying each one in the wannabe Postman Pat mock-up, giving me pitying looks through the glass every time, she actually does the sucking her breath in shit. I want to remind her that she’s a post mistress and not a car mechanic about to give an estimate. Then she says she was sorry but due to how messily I’ve stuffed them, all the envelopes need the bigger more expensive stamp.”

“What did you do?”

“I took them all back off her, put them on the floor, and stood on them. That flattened them enough.”

This week’s rant was about a customer at the restaurant where James waits tables.

“He asks me if we had any Peach Sorbet. I know for a fact we don’t, as I’d made the sorbets that afternoon. But I don’t give the guy in question that bit of extra information because I don’t like him to begin with. He asks am I sure there’s no peach. I say I am. Then when I’ve walked off to take someone else’s order, I see him call the manager over and ask him about the peach. I’ve said I’m not serving him in the future.”

“Who was this?”

He told me.

“Ah, you mean The Killer", I said.

The Killer is the local solicitor. By which I mean that he deals with parking fines, Yacht Club treasury embezzlement and appeals when the town council denies second homers planning permission for new under-sink bins - not that he has fifty yards for business between the church and Crew Clothing.

I used to make up tennis fours with The Killer. Which reminds me. This Olympics business. How heinous is it?

I’ve twice now been a judge at the Arts Olympics staged by Nathan De Ville at the Vauxhall Tavern. The events are poetry, painting and dance. On a table by the door is a petition to sign that gets sent to the Sports Minister at curtain down.

I enjoy being a judge, though it worries me that I turn so readily into Michael Nunn.

“Margot didn’t need to try and draw attention to herself in Nutcracker by irrelevantly coming on naked”, I shouted at Jane, contestant number three. “And smile. Woah!...can we cut the plié on the repeat, please, if you’re going to smile from there at the nice people…”

I told this story to the MP during our run-in over the Olympics taking so much Arts Council funding.

“Oh, but joking aside”, he said. “We really need to host the games. With such an event here in the country, think how many people will be inspired to take up sport.”

“Not true”, I said. “I live near Regent’s Park. Every year at Wimbledon time, you see them out on the courts wearing their whites, singing the Today At Wimbledon theme tune, playing as badly as ever, except now before they serve they bounce the ball twenty-seven times and pick their shorts out of their bums because they’ve seen Nadal doing that. Two days after the men’s final, they’re not out there any more.”

He tried another tack.

“But having all the money you deplore being poured into sport can only lead to improvements in the standards of us Brits.”

“The billions of private sponsorship that football gets hasn’t had that effect on our national teams to date, has it? It’s a very expensive bit of fluff, hosting the Olympics. The only thing that works bringing talent out and forward is what someone like Christine Trueman is doing in Aldeburgh. No kid there can move without her shoving a tennis racquet at it and saying, “Can you grip this just as though you were shaking hands?”

All kids there, too, not just the hyphenated summer-visitor ones.

“Which pleases me”, I told the MP, “as real talent turns up anywhere, not just among those that can afford to have it. Which goes for the arts. Take ballet, for instance. When Peter The Great nicked ballet from Versailles and added Italian acrobatics to it, the first dancers were his boyars and serfs. Ballet was, and ever has been, for all over there. Which leads to a tsunami of a talent pool. Posh English people aren’t for art and never have been. Little girls from Surrey do ballet for the same reason that little girls from Surrey do pony club. No depth of talent means that too often something curdled rises to the top rather than cream. The lack of state funding. The it’s only for posh people perception. The complete opposite of what has always happened in Russia.”

The parochial is on show at dance festivals and fund-raisers country-wide. But then, what are we aiming at? A national company defined by the fact that, with the exception of Nureyev for obvious reasons, the original cast members of Dancing At A Gathering still dine out on stories of Robbins in the studio.

“The saying isn’t, "Dead in the bucket”, I have to keep reminding me mother, who has drowned any number of kittens in her time, “it’s, "Dead in the water…”

And what of the ballet teachers in this country? Here’s one for us to look at closely. She was one of my landladies when I taught singing at the Guildford School Of Acting. Let’s call her Isabel.

While Isabel’s dance school was for various reasons (each more bonkers than the last) out of commission, she taught ballet two mornings a week at an infants’ school and for one hour a week at the Guildford School Of Acting. At the infant school a boy got an erection every time they did small jumps. At GSA, I provided the fun by playing the piano for the class to earn Martini money.

Isabel was both petite and galumphing. She had a nose either like a strawberry or a pig, depending on how infuriating she was being, freckles I suspect she drew on, and hair like walrus skin earmuffs. Once a year she went to the Ash Sue Ryder and re-mixed and matched her wardrobe of velour tracksuits, winceyette nighties and Grannies Need Not Apply…Which Part Of That Did You Not Understand?…Not For You…Buy Some Of Those Brown Fur-Lined Boots…Oh, Now Look What Monstrosities You’ve Gone And Bought…trainers.

At the meet the new staff lunch Isabel (I swear!) gave us the following run down on her and hers,

“I’m Isabel…Isy…Is, whatever you like, really. I live in Ash. The town across the Hog’s Back from here. I haven’t got some kind of Cinderella Complex. Ha ha ha.”

It was the kind of laugh an am-dram actress would say she “found” to take onstage with her.

“I was trained for the classical ballet at mummy’s knee. Mummy was one of the four girls that went with Fonteyn to Paris to study with Vera Volkova…”

If I had a penny for the number of people who say that of their bunhead mummies…

“The first thing mummy taught me was about fingers. How they should be arranged as though one were holding the most delicate piece of India Silk between the thumb and second finger. Although dancing was always, and still is, my first love, I decided to fit another string to my bow in my teens and take acting and voice lessons with Carson Peekers. He was young then and brilliant: Coombe, Cram, Creamer, Croud, Crawley, Croon…I can still remember his voice workout. I’ve gone the way of most of us trained for this business, odd times in ballet, and tele. I did quite a bit of getting out of carriageing in Upstairs Downstairs and getting barged by Joan Sutherland during Lucia’s Mad Scene at The Garden. And of late I’ve been quite a fixture eating fry-ups in a certain café in a certain East End square…”

(Where, talking of Rupert’s little brother, Mr. Pennefather himself has been moonlighting playing Sean Slater.)

Isabel waited for someone to say something. But what was there to be said?

“Oh, God, yes. I knew I’d seen you before. Brilliant stepping down from barouche and baked bean fork to mouth acting. When’s Reese Witherspoon retiring to make way?”

A girl who had graduated from college two years previously was playing Frankie in Eastenders. She paid a state visit to GSA, and recognised Isabel.

“She’s always buggering continuity by actually eating the food.”

Sadly, due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to move in with Isabel.

“It’s a lovely little cottage”, said Kate Napier, head of Academic studies at Guildford. “Just round the corner from me. So I can drive you in and out. Ash’s a bit of a fiddle on the train. Isabel’s place could do with a bit of a tidy up, by the way. But it’s a sweet little place.”

My bedroom was okay – a bit damask pink and threatening furniture, and I could have done without looking under the bed and finding a chamber pot. And why was I born curious? Would you have pulled it out to look inside? Isabel had said: “Anything you need, just ask. I won’t be shocked”. She was surprised when the first thing I asked for were Jeyes Fluid and rubber gloves.

The sitting room was a mess of cobwebs, newspapers, and enough sluts wool to keep Gap making sweaters for two decades. The bathroom tucked under the stairs was decorated with a mould mural. The white goods in the kitchen were off-grey and covered in kid’s artwork – “my infants’ ballet class” – stuff was spilling out from behind the fixtures, and the ironing board was set up covered with more newspapers, mail and jars of home made marmalade.

“Mummy’s recipe - you probably saw her come second with sepia effect view of ruined abbey from marshy inlet on Watercolour Challenge – I sell it at the church. Sorry about the state of the place. I’m inured. I grew up in this house, you see. One day I’ll get round to having a good old clear out. Bit Bohemian, isn’t it?”

“Totally”, I said.

“Oh, which reminds me…”

She crossed to the window sill and Bobby Crush'd the trim phone.

“Hi, Jenny, it’s Isabel. Re my Christmas offering. Yes, I know it’s only May, but you know that the true professional never wings a performance. Anyway, it’s letters and diaries, so I’m thinking jolly and I’m thinking Festive…”

She looked peeved at Jenny’s interruption.

“Actually, Jenny, I don’t think we would find anything jolly and festive in the Diary Of Anne Frank. Anyway, just making you aware. Bye for now”.

She smiled long-sufferingly, and shrugged in the direction of the phone.

“Jenny gets a bit macabre at times”.

Tom, an Aldeburgh crony, was studying at Ash Art College. When I suggested a drink or three, he said he’d meet me at mine so he could see where I was living.

Isabel was out teaching, so Tom could say “Jesus f**k” again and again with impunity.

“All that’s missing is the mouse-inhabited wedding cake.”

As we were leaving to walk into town, Isabel was coming up the drive. She dropped a curtsey.

“Do you see I am holding my dress in one hand? I am, therefore, noble. Servants held their dresses in two hands, countesses and above in one.”

“She’s a f**king fruitcake”, Tom whispered as we crunched along the gravel.

A week or so later, Isabel asked if Tom had come round while she had been at rehearsals the previous night.

“Yes”, I answered.

“Ah…”

“Why?”

“Because I left my bank statement out on my bed and it showed definite signs of having been read.”

And the signs were what - eye-scan treads?

“Didn’t want to make a scene last night. Wanted to sleep on it. Don’t need any more stress added to my teaching schedule, not to mention choreographing for the Ash Shakespeare Company or my gruelling one-woman show.”

One thing Lis Bevernick taught me is: never give be an audience to a nutter. (And the rent for the room at Isabel’s was an hour and a half’s worth of teaching). Very calmly I said, “Tom was downstairs all the time he was here, which wasn’t for long, as he was only waiting for me to put my shoes on to go out.”

“He is a student, you see. Money worries and all that…”

“No. When his mother comes up to London once a month to go through her portfolio with her broker, it’s the size of the average front door under her arm getting off the train at Charing Cross.”

I was in the Ash Shakespeare Company production. Much Ado About Nothing. I played Balthasar, all butch and back from the wars.

“Remember the special bond that exists between men that fight together,” Kate Napier, Head Of Academia for the Ash Shakespeare Company, told us “and have an intense closeness in your interactions.”

Which I took to mean continually checking out Lorne, playing Claudio, from the rear in his uniform trousers.

The musical director, some ex-Oxford nerd with perfect pitch, asked me to interpolate a cadenza at the end of the first song, Sigh No More, Ladies. I did.

“No, that’s not period…” he would queen at whatever twiddles I tried out. But after waiting around to watch opening night, he went to rejoin his chamber choir The Brasenose Camerata – him plus nine other nerds with perfect pitch – so I could do what I liked. Only half way into the run I was using Dame Joan Sutherland’s Beatrice Di Tenda cadenzas.

Isabel’s contribution to the production was to choreograph the dances. She was more presentation over content and had the hots for the Benedict. Which was good, as we would have fallen out if we had been in competition for the Claudio.

“Benedict,” she would tootle, “if you’re not versifying, shall we have another go at your simple simple doubles?”

She would take him to the other side of the field and go through whatever it was. Their steps always mismatched, he would ask again and again what that bit should have been and could they go over it again? Meanwhile, she had jettisoned the steps and was tossing her hair as she changed direction and fixing him with a gimlet in rut eye.

None of us at first got the main dance right. The middle section always fell apart. We were in two groups at that point, going round the dance opposite ways in two semi-circles.

“And again.”

“And again.”

“Oh, can we get this right. And again…”

Isabel getting angry was Mrs. Tiggywinkle having a go with a chainsaw. Having nearly for the umpteenth time been mown down by Lorne, the actor playing Claudio, I got him to count through what Isabel had set for his side.

“Iestyn, why have we gone walk-about?” Isabel sang.

“Just trying to get this bit right, Isabel.”

“But why you should be making such heavy weather of it, when you have Aurora, Odette/Odile and Giselle in your rep I just couldn’t say.”

“Mental block.”

Lorne counted out the steps Isabel had set for his group’s side of the semi-circle.

“And one and two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and you bow and curtsey. Is deciding whether to bow or curtsey what’s confusing you?”

“Bog off, Lorne.”

“Okay.”

I told Isabel I knew what the problem was now.

“That you can’t get it right, basically,” she said.

“No, that it’s been set wrong.”

She snorted. I explained, “We have fifteen counts and then we…”

“…bow and curtsey, yes I know. I am the choreographer, after all.”

“But they have sixteen counts and they bow and curtsey.”

“Yes.”

“That means that they have seventeen counts in all while we have sixteen.”

Other cast members were walking through the steps and totting up in their heads.

“Oh yes of course”, said John The Bastard.

Isabel said, “Some people are getting a little too big for their boots.”

“Oh come off it, we’ve wasted how long going over this and all because they had an extra beat?”

“Well perhaps I should just go home then and forget all about being here and working on the production.”

Yep.

The director led her away and she cried and catharted. We caught snippets.

“It’s just the heat…and this gruelling one woman tour…and I haven’t even had a minute to think about the jam this year…”

Isabel was one of those people who are so on output all the time, you must never ask them questions (pace what Dreenagh Forestier-Walker says about asking five questions in two minutes of someone that you just met.) All the time I rented a room from her, I never asked about the one-woman tour.

But I found out.

It was on the day I happened to mention that I was being interviewed by the Ash Herald about Much Ado.

“Well, you’re on your own with that one”, Isabel snapped. “I just can’t add any more to my work load.”

“I didn’t ask…”

“On my list today is the dry cleaners, wax lids and elastic bands (which I really oughtn’t to be thinking about but I couldn’t look mummy in the eye if I didn’t keep up the jam making tradition) paper plates, a pile of sandwiches to make, orange squash to dilute, and I have to collect what I like to call my fellow performers in the face of the contempt of Margot and her husband, because tonight - though I don’t suppose anyone’s noticed or in fact cares – I have another performance in my gruelling one woman tour. And nobody’s been what you would call forthcoming re bears.”

She waited for me to ask. She’s still waiting.

When I got back from the interview, there were Isabel and her friend Margot (as usual in a smock and dungarees with her legs on upside down) standing against opposite walls of the sitting room.

“She’s lost the bloody bears”, said Margot.

“Oh, come on now, Margot”, said Isabel, a là plucky heroine in WW2 film, “they’ll turn up.”

“I didn’t want to lend her them in the first place, knowing how scatty she gets”, Margot went on.

“I was stressed, that’s all.”

“But why take them down to the hall in a bin-liner?”

It was like a round of Whose Line Is It Anyway? with me having to guess what obscure subject Margot and Isabel had been given for an improvisation.

“Did the performance go well?” I asked.

“Perfectly, thank you. I think I really gave of my very best. I could tell I changed the colour of the room. You can always tell when you’ve done that, can’t you?”

“Oh, yes, marvellous, brava, diva.”

“Oh, don’t, Margot”, Isabel interrupted, doing the Dalcroze martyred one half step to right, look down and left. “I wasn’t in the zone today, I admit. But it can really flow and provoke an alteration in the audience. It’s been remarked upon.”

Margot turned to me and said, “You don’t know what she does in what she calls her gruelling one-woman show, do you?”

“No.”

“She does a…what would you call it…sketch…”

“Installation, Margot.”

“Bloody well not an installation. It’s a skit or a puppet show.”

“Have it your own way.”

“I would except no-one can have it at all now seeing as you’ve lost all the bears.”

There was a stand off of some seconds and Margot went on, “She arranges teddies in two rows of eight, one of nine, with a prop sandwich on a paper plate in front, switches the tape on and then wiggles the paws of random bears…”

“What the twelve-tone scale composers wrote was random. Didn’t stop them producing great works of art”, Isabel put in.

“…which is the bears dancing, apparently. For the grand finale she pretends that a naughty bear in the front row is eating…”

“…pic-nicing, Margot, the clue’s…”

“…the sandwiches and saying “yum yum.” I think the true art in her performance is the way she can make it sound as though she’s doing a nation wide ending up in the West End tour of at least Hedda Gabler or Mother Courage. And this is what she’s been banging on to you about no doubt as her gruelling one woman tour. And today, as I said, she took the bears to the hall in a bin liner. And when the...er…”

“…installation…”

“…thing was over, she put the bears back in the bin liner, left them while she went out front to be part with her adoring public, and when she got back, they’d been put in a compactor with the rest of the rubbish. My bear was an heirloom. I saw one just like it on Antiques Roadshow. It had the thing in its ear. I screamed “as much as that” which was something I always said I’d never do even if I ever happened to be on the programme let alone just watching at home.”

Don’t talk to me about Antiques Roadshow. I got apoplexy from watching it during a paid house-sitting stint at Stanny when I lived in Aldeburgh.

“There’s one of those downstairs”, I told on-screen Lars Tharp, “except it’s bigger and older…”

“And one of those…”

“And a whole set of those…”

And when I’d heard the “as much as that” total one time too many, I set the burglar alarm to Whole House and stood on the one square foot of Aubusson by the grandfather clock where its laser can't sense you gibbering “As much as that…as much as that…”

I went for lunch at Stanny when I was back working with James on the radio show. On my way there I walked past the tennis courts. Christine Trueman was putting some of the yoof of the town through the Sabbatini drill.

“There we are”, I said to myself, and thought of an appropriate analogy, “at least we have one safe pair of hands nurturing talent.”

That isn’t appropriate, actually. “Safe pair of hands” is a cricketing analogy. Ed.

Posted by iestyn at March 14, 2008 11:23 AM