Ha'penny

Chapter 1 They don't hang people like me. They don't want the embarrassment of a trial, and besides, Pappa is who he is. Like it or not, I'm a Larkin. They don't want the headline "Peer's Daughter Hanged." So much easier to shut me away and promise that if I keep very quiet they'll release me as cured into my family's custody in a year or two. Well, I may have been an awful fool, but I've never been saner, and besides, I can't stand most of my family. I've never had the slightest intention of keeping quiet. That's why I'm writing this. I hope someone someday might get the chance to read it. Pay attention. I'm going to tell you the important things, in order. It started in the most innocuous way, with a job offer. "You are the only woman I can truly imagine as Hamlet, Viola." Antony gazed into my eyes across the table in a way which someone must have told him was soulful and irresistible, but which actually makes him look like a spaniel that needs worming. He was one of London's best-known actor managers, very distinguished, quite fifty years old, and running a little to fat. It was an honor to be given one of Antony's famous lunches, always tete-a-tete, always at the Venezia in Bedford Street, and always culminating, after the mouthwatering dessert, in the offer of a leading role. That was the year that everyone was doing theater cross-cast. It was 1949, eight years after the end of the war. London's theaters were brightly lit, and full of the joys and struggles of life. Palmer did it first, the year before, putting on The Duke of Malfi at the Aldwych. Everyone said it would be a fizzle at best, but we all went to see how they did it, out of curiosity. Then, with Charlie Brandin getting raves as the Duke, Sir Marmaduke jumped on the bandwagon and did Barrie's old Quality Street, with all the men as women and all the women men. It was the success of the winter, so when plays were being picked for the summer season, of course there was hardly a house playing things straight. I'd scoffed as much as anyone, or more, so much in fact that I'd turned down a couple of parts and thought of leaving town and lying low for a little. But if I left, where could I go? London theater was putting up a brave struggle against the cinema, a struggle already lost elsewhere. Theater in the provinces was at its last death rattle. When I was starting out, a London play would be toured all over the country, not by the London cast but by a second-string company. There might be two or three tours of the same play, the second company doing Brighton and Birmingham and Manchester, and the third doing a circuit of Cardiff and Lancaster and Blackpool. The deadliest tours played at every tiny place, crossing the country by train on a Sunday, staying in the most appalling digs. It was the way you started out, and if you were better known and wanted a rest from London, the second companies were panting to snap you up. But since the war tours were rare, and there was fierce competition for them. There was only London, and the occasional tryout elsewhere. People in the provinces could just whistle for theater. They were starved of it entirely. I can't think how they managed. Amateur productions and coming up to London when they could afford it, I suppose. Either that or they really were quite happy with the cinema instead. In any case, there was no hope of a tour for me. If I didn't work, I could afford to lie quiet for a season, if I lived carefully. The problem was that I couldn't count on it being only one season. The theater lives from moment to moment, and once your name isn&Walton, Jo is the author of 'Ha'penny', published 2008 under ISBN 9780765358080 and ISBN 0765358085.