Maggie Smith: A Biography (4 page)

The making of an actor is an odd, mostly incalculable, business. But Oxford definitely made Margaret Smith an actress. Her thespian development was part circumstantial, part temperamental. Although she has remained ambiguous on the subject of Oxford all her subsequent life, young Margaret found more room to manoeuvre and thrive than she would ever have done in Ilford. The family became, in a quiet way, an integral part of the medical and intellectual life of the city. Cowley may have been on the suburban fringe, but Nat, as a technician at the Dunn School, was involved in a body of work on penicillin therapy that was, in the words of the
Encyclopaedia of Oxford
, ‘among the most valuable undertaken in the whole history of medicine’. The work was led by Howard Walter Florey, later Lord Florey of Adelaide, who in 1945 shared the Nobel Prize for medicine with Sir Ernst Boris Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming, who had discovered penicillin in 1928.

The new house was built between the wars on an estate next to the vicarage of St James’s Church, a High Anglican establishment where Margaret attended the infants’ school and her brothers painted theatrical scenery for the social club. There was a modest garden, nearby fields and a cemetery where ghoulish games were played. Margaret claims to have been compelled by her brothers to eat deadly nightshade, though Ian had no memory of this. Inevitably, ‘the boys’, as they were known to everyone, grew further apart from Margaret. Their back bedroom, cluttered with set squares, drawing equipment and two large elephant boards, was out of bounds to the little girl, who was nonetheless adept at making a nuisance of herself by stealing their pencils. There were hardly any toys in the house. It was a spartan, though certainly not deprived, childhood. Years later, Alistair’s widow, Shân Smith, recalled a striking detail: at Christmas, the children were never given presents, but ten shillings each, and were told to go and buy what they wanted. Shân, who came from a stable middle-class Welsh background, maintains that all three Smith children, partly because of a repressive childhood, suffered from black depressions and a sense of failure that would haunt them all their lives. Today, Maggie does not, on the whole, look on the bright side of life. Gaiety and good cheer tend to be reserved for her performances, or at least some of them.

The next-door neighbours, the Jenkins family at Number 53, were considered a slightly ‘rackety’ crowd. Margaret was allowed to be friends with Shirley Jenkins under some degree of sufferance from Meg. Shirley herself, just four months older than Margaret, married an American airman at the age of eighteen and left Oxford for the United States. She remembers Nat doing little magic tricks at children’s tea-parties. Shirley used to play the piano loudly in order to gain Margaret’s attention, and Margaret would bang on the wall with a poker to let Shirley know that she could hear the music. Meg used the same poker to bang on the wall as a signal to Margaret that it was time to come home.

‘During the summers,’ Shirley recalls, ‘we would, along with other neighbourhood children, do “concerts” in our back gardens. Dancing and singing and dressing up. We did all the usual childhood things – hide and seek, hopscotch, skipping, rolling hoops, whips and tops, frozen statues … In the spring we would ride our bikes to Radley Woods and pick armfuls of bluebells.’

The apparent normality of this childhood was a mask for an unusually strict atmosphere in the home. Ian does not remember Margaret being naughty, but there was a marked antagonism between her and Meg: ‘It never erupted into the open; it just sort of simmered.’ But she was certainly the apple of Nat’s eye. The boys were allowed neither bikes nor roller-skates, and Meg forbade them to play rugby at school. If one of the children was scratched or bruised, bandages were efficiently applied, but the underlying parental attitude was, ‘What did you do that for?’ as though, Ian says, one had done it deliberately. Holidays were a rarity. And relatives were hardly ever made welcome. There was very little money – Nat was never well paid – and Meg watched every single penny. She had a job as an accounts secretary at the local Morris Motors car-manufacturing plant and was out every day. Margaret, cast as Cinderella from a very early age, did most of the ironing and cleaning around the house. She cannot recall her mother
not
going out to work.

Money was found for some things. While the boys settled into their new school and started on the long haul to fulfilling their ambition to become architects, Margaret moved from the little church school to Greycotes. One of her friends there was the novelist Graham Greene’s daughter, Lucy, who was one year older but shared the same birthday. There was a piano in the house for a time, and Margaret went across the road for lessons with Mrs Loxton. Margaret was no new Moura Lympany. Her skills were rudimentary, but useful in later life when she was obliged to act at the keyboard, as in
The Guardsman
on stage and
A Private Function
on film. She also took ballet classes at the Vera Legge School of Dancing in a studio on the top floor of Taphouse’s in Magdalen Street, equidistant by about fifty yards from both the Playhouse and the New Theatre.

No Oxford pantomime was complete in those days without a pirouetting band of Vera’s prepubescent chorines, who were billed as ‘Vera Legge’s Juveniles’. There are photographs of the nine-year-old Margaret in her red satin blouse (with the initials ‘VL’ on the left breast), white pleated skirt and red ballet pumps, posing unpromisingly in the Church Hill Road back garden. Ian remembered his sister tap-dancing on the top of the Morrison shelter, the big steel table which families jammed into their dining rooms during the war in case of a bomb attack: ‘She certainly gave a performance. I think she was pretty good. I was impressed.’ Though Margaret did not herself appear at the New Theatre in pantomime, the possibilities of performance as an escape from suffocating home life must have loomed invitingly, if not necessarily more powerfully, than for any girl of Margaret’s age. She first ‘went public’, according to Nat, after one of her ballet lessons. Still attired in blouse, skirt and pumps, she was taken shopping by her mother. While Meg went inside to join a queue, Margaret stayed outside on the pavement to regale a small crowd with one of Arthur Askey’s popular ditties: ‘I’m a little fairy flower, growing wilder by the hour.’

There were few outings to theatre or cinema, though Maggie does remember seeing
The Shop at Sly Corner
, a popular thriller, at the Playhouse in the late 1940s and being so impressed by John Moffatt’s performance that she asked for his autograph. She worked many times with Moffatt in later life. His was the only autograph she remembers ever collecting. She saw her first movie,
The Jolson Story
, in 1946. She didn’t think much of it, and thought even less when Nat beat her for going to the cinema in the first place. Otherwise, life was unexceptional after the war. Margaret continued at Greycotes through the freezing cold winter of 1946/47. Port Meadow froze over, and Maggie recalls Lucy Greene’s father materialising before them like a great tall bear in a huge grey coat. Nat says that Margaret was a delightful, happy creature through early adolescence, but Ian speaks of ‘a very rigid, inflexible upbringing and a humourless childhood. That Maggie managed to break out of it as she did is all the more remarkable.’

The children were beaten for any minor transgression. Bottoms were bared and Nat would do his duty with a leather belt. This was nothing unusual in working- and lower-middle-class families of the period. Neighbours, however, only saw an almost perfect small family, industrious and well-mannered, with two clever boys and a sweet little girl. A correspondent in the Cowley
Chronicle
of May 1970, Michael Clifford, painted a bright picture of Margaret aged twelve or thirteen:

A charming little school essay at about this time, 1946, gives a clue to future obsessions. It concerns the ‘Jimbies’, no doubt an afterthought to Edward Lear’s Jumblies, in a ‘nonsensical essay and a deal of truth’. These Jimbies, of no special shape, are like gremlins who get into the mechanics of a theatre and mess things up. Having isolated the problem, the young essayist outlines the steps to be taken: ‘The only way to rid your theatre of them is to spray it regularly with DDT and spirit gum – and to drink as much tonic water and black coffee as possible.’

In the summer term of 1947, she went on an assisted place to Oxford High School for Girls, one of the best schools in Britain. Its list of old girls includes the former headmistress and moral scientist Dame Mary Warnock, the writer Rose Macaulay, the poet Elizabeth Jennings, the academic Helen Darbishire, the entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox, the actress Miriam Margolyes and the conductor – the first woman ever to wave the baton in the pit of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and music director of English National Opera in the 1990s – Sian Edwards. During her four years there, in spite of being remembered for the imagination she brought to English composition, Margaret made little academic impression and hardly any at all as an actress. Nonetheless, her school years had a considerable, if negative, influence in determining her future on the stage.

The boys went from strength to strength. On arrival from Ilford, Ian and Alistair had gone for interviews at the City of Oxford High School, just across the road from the New Theatre in George Street. Ian remembers that both he and Alistair had been struck by the story of Lawrence of Arabia, a fact that emerged in the course of the interview. The master said that T. E. Lawrence had been at the school at the turn of the century, and that therefore the twins had better be enrolled in Lawrence House. The new world of physics and mathematics excited the boys, but they were even more impressed by their new surroundings. The school had been designed in the late 1870s, in the Early English Renaissance style, and they came to this architecturally meritorious haven after attending a primary school in Ilford of no architectural distinction whatsoever.

It was taken for granted that Ian and Alistair would become architects. They were precociously good draughtsmen and would go into the city at every spare moment to draw. When it came to the School Certificate, the teachers balked at allowing them to take the architecture paper, chiefly because the school didn’t teach it. But after pressing their case, they were allowed to sit the exam. At the age of fourteen, both gained distinctions. Alistair, who was counted the brighter of two very bright boys, took his Higher Schools Certificate two years later in 1944, but Ian had already left, impatient to start studying at the School of Architecture within the Schools of Technology, Art and Commerce, later the Polytechnic in Headington, and later still one of the campuses of Oxford Brookes University.

When Alistair joined Ian at the School, he caught up with him on the five-year course, compressing his studies into four, and both took the final examinations in 1949, aged twenty. The minimum age for election to the Royal Institute of British Architects was twenty-one. Ian and Alistair kicked their heels for a time before leaving Church Hill Road, and Oxford, for good in 1950. They went to London and shared a flat in Peel Street, Kensington.

Margaret had no intention of competing with this sort of academic distinction. In the summer of 1951, she was in the first batch of British girls to take the new General Certificate of Education at Ordinary Level. She managed to scrape four unimpressive passes, in English Language, English Literature (her best result: 54/100), French (by one mark) and art; she failed, quite badly, in history, geography and biology. She had not fitted in. One month before he died, Nat waxed more maudlin than usual on this subject:

That obstructive, later philosophically semi-repentant, teacher was Dorothy Bartholomew, and the play was
Twelfth Night
, in which Margaret was cast as a page when she had set her heart on Viola or Feste. Ian saw this production: ‘Her part was to come on between the acts and announce the scene changes by holding up a big piece of cardboard. She would then bow, and go off. There was no sign at all of this being the first step in an illustrious career!’ In a curious way, however, it was. The whole fairly unhappy experience of the Oxford High School had the effect of concentrating Margaret’s ambition elsewhere.

The school, founded in 1875, was the eighth of the great Girls’ Public Day Schools Company. Its first prospectus declared its aim of receiving girls from all walks of life and of providing them with ‘an education as thorough if not as extensive as that which their brothers are receiving at the public schools’. Its first home was the Judges’ Lodgings in St Giles, but a new building was erected on the Banbury Road in 1880. Charles Dodgson, the mathematician of Christ Church better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, delivered some lectures in logic at the school in 1887. The library still has several dedicated copies, in both English and German, of Carroll’s most celebrated book.