Picture, Joan Street.

Watching John Nettles in Midsomer Murders on television recently ( remember him as the copper, Jim Bergerac back in 1980s?) I was struck by how many murders there are per episode (around six, which if replicated across the UK would mean that at least 10% of the population are being murdered every year), and pleasantly reminded what a good actor, and thoroughly nice man John is.

John lives just outside Stratford in a converted 19th century barn which he bought when he moved from Jersey to join the RSC in the early 1990s. To see John on stage again I was reminded that he is an actor who spent most of his early career in the theatre and is not a graduate of the academy of acting known as The Bill

Some years ago I remember finding myself in the lounge of a hotel in Lancashire ear wigging a conversation John was having with a writer. Actually it wasn’t a conversation but a pitch by the writer for a ‘brilliant’ idea he’d had about a TV series that would feature a renegade policeman who drank too much, slept with too many women, drove an old battered car, and, much to the consternation of his superiors, always got his man. So highly original was this pitch that it was probably then that John decided to phone his agent and tell him to get in touch with the RSC, immediately.

As regular readers of my stuff will know (and mightily bored you are too no doubt) I was lucky enough to find myself in Sir Peter Hall’s 1995 RSC production of Julius Caesar, which featured John Nettles as a very cool, and very calculating Brutus. As a production it got some pretty bad notices, but if you were in the thing it was one of the most exciting, confusing, exhausting, and exhilarating theatrical experiences you were ever likely to have.

RSC spear-carriers have to be able to make costume changes very quickly and in Ceasar we had to go from being splendidly dressed senators to ragged citizens to Roman Legionnaires in a matter of minutes. Consequently the costumes for each change were laid out on the floor of the long narrow area behind the main stage with each of us assigned a dresser to help in the change. It was a terrifying and rather intimate experience but once we had done it a few times we could make those changes in less than thirty seconds and re-appear on stage without even breathing heavily. Because of the amount of kit required ( breast-plate, helmet, sword and shield, dagger, shin protectors etc) trying to be a Roman Legionnaire was the hardest work, and to help us look and act like soldiers Peter Hall decided early on in rehearsals to put us through a couple of weeks of British Army parade ground drill.

The drill sergeant Hall found was a dead-ringer for William Hartnell from Carry On Sergeant who, after making us line up and stand to attention (Hall had built a full size replica of the main RST stage in the Ashcroft Room above the Swan Theatre) gave us a thorough dressing-down for being the most slovenly, unsoldierly bunch of untrainable heaps of compost he’d ever come across.

“ You’re in the army now, my lads.” The sergeant informed us with an evil grin.

Every day for two weeks we were shouted at, made to march slowly, quickly, slowly and quickly, taught how to present arms, slope arms, and then how to present and slope arms on the march, how to fire in ranks (straight out of Zulu), and how to stand still in ranks, very still.

“ You moved!” screamed the sergeant. “ I said you moved, you with the disgusting ruddy beard!”

It eventually dawned on me that he meant me. I screamed back, “ Sorry!”

“ Sergeant!”

“ Sorry, sergeant!”

“ No one moves on parade. Is that clear?”

“ Yes, sergeant!” We all screamed back.

“ Now, I want to see you marching, and marching like you’ve never marched before. Wait for my order! Wait for it! Left turn! And by the left quick march! Left right, left right, left right…”

And then one night he didn’t turn up. Apparently he’d had a bit of a breakdown and had taken to his bed mumbling something about the declining standards of the British Army. But we could march. Look out Philippi!

Sixty-seven performances later I’ve given up marching on Philippi and was sitting in the wings eating a bar of chocolate and listening to the closing of the play, and John Nettles, as Brutus, saying his farewells…

BRUTUS: Farewell to you; and you; and you Volumnius…

But suddenly John came off stage in something of a flourish. But he doesn’t come off stage at that point, I thought. He smiled at me.

“ Alright?” he asked.

“ Yes, John, I’m fine. But shouldn’t you be on…?”

“ Hmm? On what? ”

” The stage…”

” Oh, fiddle-sticks, ” he said. Well, actually he said something much stronger starting with an ‘ F ‘.

We then heard the actor who was playing Clitus paraphrasing Brutus’ lines as if they were his own before running off stage himself and screaming from the wings:

“He has fallen upon his sword!”

John was still repeating the ‘F’ word as the other actors came off stage leaving a bewildered Mark Anthony to wind-up the play.

The audience probably thought it a very innovative way to end the play.

It cost John Nettles an arm and a leg in the pub that night.

Steve at Eleven.

In the September of 1959 Stratford’s Hugh Clopton Secondary Modern School felt more like Stalag Luft III than a place of education. It was run like a German POW camp too, which, thanks to such films as The Wooden Horse, we, as the new intake of prisoners, I mean pupils, were all too familiar with. All we could expect was brutality and bad food. Our duty was to harass the enemy in every way we could, and if given the opportunity escape to the newsagents across the road to nick sweets, fags, and gawp at the latest edition of that pornographic masterpiece, Tit Bits!

On that first day of term, forty-seven years ago, we were all lined up, in our grey blazers and short grey trousers, ready for inspection by Herr Kommandant Darlow, who looked like a bad imitation of the 1930s film star, Will Hay. But this was a Will Hay with a difference. Gone was the befuddled attitude, askew spectacles, and the inherent kindness. No, this camp Kommandant meant business, violent business. I can remember fear washing over me (and I didn’t frighten easily) as he walked up and down the ranks of new boys, stopping every now and then in front of a quivering lump of a boy to shout out instructions for the poor wretch to straighten his tie, or pull up his socks, or comb his hair. The sound of nervous farting echoed around the quadrangle like Gene Krupa on bad acid.

Then, once the inspection was over the smiling, oh so confident, Kommandant, flexing his whacking cane, addressed the assembled new intake thus:

“ Fer u zee varr iz offer.” At least I think that’s what he said.

“ What did he say?” asked my friend Denver.

“ He wants to make us an offer.”

“ Sealonce!”

” Sealions?”

“ Is he a Kraut or somefink?” asked Denver.

“ Sounds like a ponce to me,” I replied.

“ My dad reckons all teachers are ponces,” added my other friend David, whose father had landed on D-Day and survived.

“ My dad reckons your dad’s a nutcase,” added Denver whose father had survived a Japanese POW camp and was still terribly thin.

“ I’ll tell him you said that.”

And so on…

You have to remember we were all country lads, and most of us had been at work on the land, or as butchers errand boys, since we were eight or nine years old. There wasn’t much that bothered us, least of all poncy teachers…

Crack! “ Ouch! What the…?”

Thwack! “ Er….”

Smaaaack! “ That soddin’ hurt!”

Then we spotted him, Peter Fred Kite Sellers, walking down the ranks whacking each boy on the back of the legs with his cane.

Crack! Thwack! Smaack! “ Take that you heathen swine! I shall turn you into men who respect authority. Rest assured I will!” Thwack! Smaaaack! Crack!

It was at that moment we all went very quiet. We knew we had a job to do, and silence was the order of the day. We could sort the likes of Peter Fred Kite Sellers out, no problem. We’d seen all the films and were graduates of the RAF Kinema just down the road in Wellesbourne (where the Canadians, God bless them, had ruled the roost for most of the war years) where anyone, at any age, was allowed in to see anything. Bugs Bunny was our leader, and our inspiration.

“ Er, what’s up Doc?”

What was up was that we were at the mercy of men who’d had - one way or another - a pretty rough time during the war. Well, they weren’t going to take it out on us.

One of the camp guards (sorry, teachers) went by the name of ‘Killer’. He taught chemistry and loved (and I mean loved) to take out his considerable anger on the boys who came into his ‘care’ with a T-square. And it didn’t take much to make him angry either. Just a cough at the wrong moment from one of the POWs and he’d have the boy’s trousers down and then give him a good going over with the blunt end of the aforementioned technical drawing implement. I don’t think any of us got away without a dose of the ‘Killer’s’ remedy for indiscipline. But unlike the other guards ‘Killer’ took far too much pleasure in what he did. We decided to teach him a lesson.

‘Killer’ had taught us that sulphur, once taken out of water, will combust. He’d shown us some exciting, and very smelly, experiments. We remembered that lesson, and one day when ‘Killer’ had left the classroom to discuss that afternoon’s football fixture a couple of us unlocked the chemical storeroom and emptied the water out of two jars containing sulphur, and, tipping the yellow and already smouldering sticks onto the floor relocked the storeroom door (putting the key we’d taken from ‘Killer’s’ coat pocket into his desk drawer) and returned to our desks. Within minutes smoke was billowing from under the storeroom door, followed a few minutes later by a very flustered ‘Killer’ - who couldn’t find his keys - desperately trying to break down the storeroom door. It wasn’t a very serious fire, not a fire at all really, just a lot of very smelly smoke. No one ever pointed the finger of blame and ‘Killer’ never used that T-square again, ever. We were never victims you understand, just youngsters who knew how to handle men like him.

Hugh Clopton Secondary Modern School didn’t have much time for theatre, didn’t rate theatre at all in fact. Oh, it paid lip service to Shakespeare, just. An old English teacher ( his name escapes me) used to get us to read a play a week with each POW reading half a dozen lines before someone else took over. It didn’t make any sense of the play of course, but the teacher was happy to let us gabble on while he read the newspaper, or caught up on some marking.

In 1961 a new teacher arrived who changed everything. His name was Mr Jones, he was very young (just out of college) and very Welsh, and we made his life a misery until one day he started reading Bulldog Drummond stories to us. We were hooked.

The adventures of Captain Hugh “ Bulldog” Drummond DSO (created by H.C. “Sapper” McNeile, and Gerald du Maurier) were an exciting eye-opener and we loved him, and his long-legged birds, with a passion. From there our fiery Welshman took us on a journey that included Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene ( you can see what he was doing), Ernest Hemingway, and by some strange circuitous route back to Shakespeare, especially the more gory plays. Mr Jones was one of those angry young men who were passionate about literature and theatre and wanted to share their passion. It was their aim in life to instill into such country yokels as myself a love of words. He succeeded too.

What Mr Jones could not do was get us down to the RST to see a show. He did the next best thing though and arranged a private screening at the local cinema of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. You’ve never seen thirty smelly schoolboys so fully engrossed as we were that Wednesday morning back in 1961.

Mr Jones is retired now but can often be seen in town absentmindedly wandering around Waterstones, or sitting by the theatre reading a scrappy old volume of something or other (probably not Bulldog Drummond) and mumbling to himself. The man was an inspiration, and if I believed in God I’d ask Him to bless the old Welshman.

The Hugh Clopton Secondary Modern school was knocked down a couple of years ago, with a new school built just a few hundred yards away. The old site is now a small housing estate with streets named after those old guards, including Herr Darlow who, incidentally spent most of World War II behind enemy lines sending back weather reports to Bomber Command. It never pays to judge people too harshly does it?

Forgive me but this is going to sound a bit H.E. Bates.

Miss Amy Brooks was my grandmother’s best and oldest friend and in the 1950s lived alone, with the exception of half a dozen dogs and thirty or more cats, on a small farm at the top of Red Hill ( just outside Wellesbourne), overlooking the RAF base. She was a kindly woman who wore her dead father’s clothes and smoked his pipe and swore like the farmer he had once been.

When I knew her she would have been in her seventies and had first met my grandmother (my father’s mother) in the late 1890s. My grandmother was in ‘service’ at the home of the vicar of Hampton Lucy, the estate village of the Fairfax Lucy family who owned Charlecote Park, which was something of a hideaway for members of the Royal Family who often required - how shall we put it - a discreet weekend retreat.

By 1908 my grandmother had married my grandfather, Harry, and moved to Wellesbourne, with Amy working on her father’s farm at the top of Red Hill. Amy had a couple of brothers who also worked on the farm, but by the 1950s she was, as described earlier, on her own, with the exception of those dogs and cats and a large gaggle of geese, and several smiling cows, and a couple of bearded goats, and scores of chickens who all came to greet my father and myself as we pulled-up in the muddy farmyard in the grey Austin A45 van to deliver bread and cakes donated every week (in exchange for six pounds of home-made butter) by my grandmother.

For my father Amy Brooks was like a kindly caring aunt who adored him, as did the dogs and cats and cows and goats and chickens who all made a tremendous din and fuss until…

“ Stop that infernal noise you heathens! Stop it I say and let Roland and Stevie in for goodness sake. Stop it or I’ll have your hides for sausages, so help me!”

And they did and Miss Brooks came marching through the fur and feathery throng wearing her dead father’s corduroy trousers, tweed jacket, plaid shirt, with the tails of his gabardine macintosh flying like kites behind her, and on her head one of his many battered old trilby hats that just about kept her long, once blonde hair, in place; with the inevitable smouldering briar in her wide, rather beautiful, mouth.

“ Good to see you, Roland, my dear.” Then, looking at me, “and how are you, Stevie boy?”

“ I’m fine, Miss Brooks. How many dogs do you have?”

“ Six at last count, but I fear old Jeremy hasn’t long in this world, like a good many of us. Listen to me. Come on the two of you into the kitchen and have a nice cup of tea.”

The farmhouse was quite large but Amy lived, ate, and slept in the smoke darkened kitchen which had a long oak table piled high with newspapers and books and the remnants of that mornings breakfast, with cats everywhere. A large inglenook fireplace housed a black range in which a fire raged hotly upon which rested a black cast iron kettle that whistled contently as we entered the room.

“ Sit by the fire, Roland, and I’ll make some tea.”

And my father did and drank his tea and promptly fell asleep (he’d been up since 3am). Amy was sitting opposite my father and in the glow of the fire in the dark room ( it only had one window and it was a dark and wet afternoon) she looked young again.

“ I wanted to be an actress once, Stevie, and star at the theatre in Stratford, and I used to go quite often too and could see myself as Juliet falling in love with Romeo. I remember on Shakespeare’s Birthday in 1905 watching the Shakespeare Club doing Ben Jonson’s, Pan’s Anniversary, on the Bancroft Gardens, which was a bit daft really and done for the toffs. The sporting events held on the fields opposite the theatre were much more fun and my brother won a cup for the one hundred yard dash, and later we had tea at the Hathaway Tea Rooms and in the evening went to see Benson’s The Comedy of Errors which was a real hoot. Oh, Stevie, how I wanted to be an actress and wear all those lovely costumes and speak those lovely words.”

She then went quiet and as she stared into the fire and my father slept I looked around the room and on the mantelpiece above the fire I saw a photograph of a cowboy sitting on a horse.

“ Is that a real cowboy, Miss Brooks?”

“ He’s my brother, Stevie.”

“ A real cowboy.”

“ A real cowboy.”

“ Is it the same cowboy that won the one hundred yard dash?”

“ Yes. He emigrated to Canada soon after and got a job as a ranch hand somewhere, not sure where.”

“ Calgary.”

“ Hmm?”

“ Probably Calgary. That’s where most of the cowboys hang out.”

“ Probably.”

“ Is he still there?”

“ God love you no. He died in the Great War somewhere in France.”

“ Oh. Do you still want to be an actress?”

“ No, I don’t think so.”

It was then she rummaged through the papers and books on the table and gave me the programme for that production of The Comedy of Errors in 1905. I wish I still had it.

“ Miss Brooks, I think there’s something on fire.”

And there was — my father’s trousers!