AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1967-1971
Nineteen sixty-seven. I had got a bit fed up carrying around Leila Berg’s book, ‘Risinghill: Death of a Comprehensive School.’ This was my protest. Though my secondary school, Clare Secondary Modern, was just a few years away from comprehensive education, at fourteen I wasn’t going to experience it.
Of course, I wasn’t expecting the freedoms of a city comprehensive school to suddenly materialise, the sort of school documented in Berg’s book, but hoped for a rush of kindness and understanding. Michael Duane, head of Risinghill Comp was my hero – a martyr to the cause. It wasn’t until many years later I found out he’d taught in a school in Lowestoft, so city versus silly Suffolk wasn’t exactly true.
However, the dark days of my schooling were about to end. A young English teacher had arrived at our Secondary Mod and he loathed the Victorian regime at the school. Canings were daily routines. Corporal punishment was weaved into the school’s fabric. Children were hit with canes, rulers, a plank of wood and Brussel sprout stalks.
Three of us handed in our prefect badges when a boy was savagely caned, a deep laceration across his hand. “Big Al” backed us. Alan Byford, our new, young, first rate teacher. “Big Al” spent over fifty days refusing to speak to any other member of staff – from the head down – in protest at what he found at the school.
The attitude of the school was summed up by this event. A newish PE teacher was a brute. He had purchased, on behalf of the school, a new trampoline. We were given strict instructions as to how to behave on it. Unfortunately Sargeant bounced a little too high and came crashing down on his face, catching his nose in the side webbing.
Blood poured from his nose.
“Get your bloody nose off my trampoline now - boy!” shouted the PE teacher, as he man-handled the lad off the apparatus and kicked his arse out of the hall.
It was customary for both staff and pupils to buy a present for a leaving member of staff. There was no such present for our PE teacher when he left. We were told in assembly that the PE teacher was leaving and he was asked to say a few words to the school.
“I came, I taught, I left,” he said.
With that, all the children assembled stood up cheering and clapping. It was a wonderful moment of rebellion.
Eventually, our new English teacher must have found an ally for he put on two plays at the school, a thing that had never happened there before. First there was ‘The Peasants’ Revolt’ (ironic, eh?) and then there was A Christmas Carol.
In the first, I played the third peasant. I had but one line, stood next to a manure heap. Indeed, some technical bod had invented a means whereby the manure heap gave off steam and though its papier mache body wasn’t entirely convincing, at fourteen, in that school, shit on the stage was really something!
The following year, I was cast as Scrooge in Dickens’ seasonal classic, ‘A Christmas Carol.’ Learning all those lines and co-ordinating my movements as I spoke to the back of the hall, was the one moment of enlightenment in all my eleven years in school: education evaporated and my learning began!
It’s hard to imagine, perhaps, but for the first fifteen or sixteen years of my life I was asleep, in a sort of daydream. I hadn’t suddenly found acting, I had found methods of learning through drama. Many years later, on a PGCE course, I wrote a dissertation that asserted drama could and should be a vehicle for teaching across the curriculum and should not be taught as a subject in itself – taken apart as if tap dancing is a subject. Plays have the world as their subject, otherwise drama is just light entertainment.
No one really picked up on my interest in drama and it was a whole year later a young, knowledgeable careers officer, pointed me towards a drama course which required no formal qualifications. Entry was by audition and interview.
I can’t remember my audition piece but I can remember the stumbling nerves. Somehow, I was offered a place on the one year course! Perhaps it was that they were short of males (there were just three of us and eight females).
Colchester Tech and Art School (Colchester Institute) is a large, rambling college twenty-five miles from Clare, in Suffolk, and as Beeching had axed the line to Clare, my father had to be committed to driving me ten miles to Sudbury at six every morning to catch the train. Later, there would be more driving me around for evening and weekend rehearsals.
Details of what were required items to undertake the course arrived in the post. Things like black tights and top and a “lancer’s jockstrap.” I plucked up the courage and entered a rather traditional men’s outfitters: “Have you got a lancer’s jockstrap please,” I asked, placing the official list on the counter. The gentleman smiled, leaned in and said, “It’s a typing error, Sir! You require a dancer’s jockstrap!”
Whatever the set backs, I was there for enrolment. The course was intense and this is what it covered:-
Dance, Dramatic Movement, Play Production, Improvisation, History of Drama, History of Theatre, Public Speaking, Poetry Speaking, English Language and Literature.
In fact, there was more than this. We had the History of Costume, Costume Design, Set Design, Prop Making, Stage Make up, Using Masks, Fencing and Gym Training.
Twice a term, there were assessments, where we’d have to act out a Shakespearian soliloquy, put together a dance and recite a poem. There was laughter and tears all the way as I grappled with the work.
The first play we presented was ‘Under Milkwood’ where we each played several parts. I was variously Mog Edwards, Mr Ogmore, Organ Morgan and the Reverend Eli Jenkins.
In the second term, our most ambitious production was Brecht’s ‘The Good Person of Szechuan’ (I played Mr Shu Fu, a nasty old pimp). To quote the local paper: “Rupert Mallin made a good deal of Mr Shu Fu.” That’s it - my first review!
Other productions included ‘As Good As New’ and ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ (I played the soppy Gordon Lowther).
At the same time as these productions, there was an original musical being staged, ‘Mr Reject,’ the creation of jazz pianist Reg Webb together with dance presentations. One of these presentations was at the University of Essex and half way through my tutor shouted at me: “Your tights! You look like a penguin! Pull them up!”
My dad had given me his black tights. He had once done some review type shows back in the late Forties and, to save money, had given me his old hose.
Unfortunately, these tights had feet in them, so there was a tendency for the tights to slowly slip down and, indeed, my fellow students were holding back tears (of laughter) as I waddled off, penguin like, to adjust my clothing!
Nesta Slack and Charles Butler ran the course and directed most of our shows – with understanding, patience and kindness.
All too soon the course was over. Without formal qualifications I couldn’t pursue the acting. In truth, it wasn’t the acting I hankered after but the whole dramatic package, with drama as a means of learning about the world. My parents, unsure what to do with me at seventeen, sent me off to live with my brother Simon who was at the University of Liverpool. I was out of his flat within the week and renting a room in Toxteth.
For a short while I got a job as usher at The Everyman Theatre and sat through many showings of John McGrath’s ‘Soft or a Girl’ directed by Alan Dosser. Occasionally, after a show, I made it down to the basement Bistro where Adrian Henri often held court.
I also joined the chorus of Unity Theatre’s production of ‘The Marat Sade.’ It was here I realised I wasn’t a very good actor and other events conspired to bring me back to Suffolk.