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- Herausgeber: Passerino
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A Star Danced is the autobiography of English actress,
Gertrude Lawrence, first published in 1945.
Gertrude Lawrence (1898-1952) was a British actress, singer, and musical theater performer. She was born on July 4, 1898, in Newington, London, England. Lawrence gained international fame for her performances in both the West End and Broadway productions. Tragically, Lawrence's life and career were cut short when she passed away at the age of 54 on September 6, 1952, in New York City. Despite her relatively short life, she left a lasting impact on the world of theater and is remembered as a talented and charismatic performer.
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Gertrude Lawrence
A Star Danced
The sky is the limit
Table of contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 1
“Lunch in London, the day after tomorrow...’
The skipper dropped the words out of one corner of his mouth without disturbing the cigarette in the other corner. He disposed of some three thousand miles of atmosphere as nonchalantly as you would toss a peanut shell over your shoulder.
I blinked. But only once. After all, the past two days had been so fantastic that this ultimate scene and conversation on the brilliantly lighted airfield outside a city in one of the Southern states, beside the big airliner which was to take me to England in a scheduled thirty-six hours, seemed part and parcel of the events that had been happening thick and fast ever since the telephone woke me at seven o’clock one morning.
The telephone had summoned me from a dream in which Richard and I were running, hand in hand, down our own narrow strip of Cape Cod beach into the ocean. Sleepily, unwilling to let go of that dream, I reached for the receiver and held it to my ear. New York calling. At Dennis, Cape Cod, at seven o’clock of a May morning, New York seems as far away as London or Timbuktu.
“Are you up?” the voice of my lawyer demanded crisply.
Knowing me as she does, this was purely a rhetorical question which, I felt, did not rate an answer. She went on: “Get up! Right away! Get yourself onto the first plane, or the first train, into New York. I’ve just had word from the Air Ministry in Washington that there is space for you on the British Airways plane leaving at midnight tomorrow. You’re on your way.”
After weeks of more or less patient waiting, repeated timid, pleading, urgent, and finally importunate requests to the authorities who rule such matters in Washington and London, and a rapid-fire barrage of telegrams, cables, and telephone calls, it had happened. At last I had permission to do what I had been wanting desperately to do for four years—go to England and do my bit on a tour for E.N.S.A. Though no one knew just when, everyone was aware that the invasion of Europe was imminent. More than anything in the world I wanted the opportunity to entertain the British and American troops who would soon be fighting in France.
Basil Dean, founder and director of E.N.S.A.—the British equivalent of the U.S.O.—had cabled, asking me to come; but getting a priority to make the crossing and getting a place aboard a plane had taken a lot of wire-pulling at the American end. Now, I was really on my way home to London which I had not seen in six years. I would see my old friends, or at least those who remained of that gay company after the Battle of Britain—those who weren’t fighting in Italy or the Near and Far East, or on any one of the seven seas.
And I might see Richard.
That thought brought me out of bed and under the shower in one swift leap. From then on the next two days were one mad rush, winding up with the final leap to the airport.
And now here I was, ready to board the big airliner for the hop to Newfoundland. I caught my breath, and did my best to imitate the casual-almost-to-the-point-of-boredom air shown by all members of all the air forces I have ever met when they are about to take off.
I was assured of passage to Newfoundland, where we were due to land at 9:00 A.M. the next day. Whether there would be a place for me in the plane going on from there to Ireland remained disturbingly uncertain. We all joked about it, standing there beside the plane. The others were sure of their passage all the way to England. They were officials or had diplomatic passports and were bursting with priorities. But I had only a number-three priority, which guaranteed me nothing much more than leave to hitch-hike.
Ernest Hemingway was among the favored ones. I met him then for the first time. There is something about Mr. Hemingway that makes one think of a small boy—a rather mischievous small boy whose pockets are full of bits of string, old rusty nails, chewing gum, and maybe a pet toad or two. A small boy hiding behind a big, bushy beard. He asked me, grinning:
“Suppose there is no place for you on the plane? What will you do?”
“Stow away,” I retorted, “in your beard!”
This, I found, was Hemingway’s first visit to England. How strange and sad, too, to have one’s first glimpse of London in her grim battle dress.
My first view of Newfoundland, from about five thousand feet, was of an enormous black-and-brown land splashed with snow, like a huge chocolate cake with white icing. All around was a calm, oily, gray sea and, overhead, a beautiful clear, cloudless sky. We had breakfast in the cabin of the plane before we docked. Then we went out to breathe the fresh, salty, fishy-smelling air, stretch our legs, and see the sights. The airport was full of Canadian, British, and American airmen from the planes which ferry steadily back and forth across the North Atlantic. You felt you were getting close to the fighting front, even though several thousand miles of ocean still stretched between Newfoundland and Europe. Here, everyone was engaged, in one way or another, in getting on with the war. The little town was crowded. People spoke matter-of-factly about hopping from continent to continent.
Recalling letters from England and tales of food shortages over there, I did some prudent shopping and emerged triumphantly with a watch, which I had forgotten to get in New York, two pounds of butter, and a dozen eggs. I tried to buy some lemons, which I knew were regarded in England as extinct, but they were extinct that day in Newfoundland also.
The local paper announced that the Germans were retreating in Italy. Good! The invasion of Europe was believed to be very near now. And it was reported that Roosevelt would run again. I wished my chances of holding my seat (in the plane) were as good as his.
After lunch and the arrival of the Pan-American Clipper, bringing more passengers bound for England, I was assured there was a place for me on the plane leaving at one-fifteen. I told Ernest Hemingway:
“Your beard is now safe from British invasion.”
For the next eighteen hours, during eight of which I slept soundly, we flew so high, sometimes at an altitude of eight thousand feet, that there was nothing to see but clouds. How strange was the knowledge that far below was the stretch of tossing gray ocean I had crossed so many times since my first trip to America in 1924, when I came over with the cast of Charlot’s Revue. Strange to think that, far below us, the American and British navies were patrolling those same waters to protect the convoys of transports and freighters which were plying back and forth with men and war matériel.
Just after daylight we had our first glimpse of Ireland—lush green fields and the heather-colored mountains of Connemara with the morning mists curling from their crests like ostrich feathers. Disturbingly peaceful it seemed after the warlike atmosphere one felt in Newfoundland. Fat white sheep grazed placidly in the fields that bordered the road by which we motored from Limerick. Several times our car slowed down to clear the road for the herds of young beef cattle, bound (as I hoped) eventually for England. Every letter I had had from friends at home had spoken wistfully of the past days of plenty. Though none of the writers complained, you read between the lines the same longing you see in children’s faces pressed against a sweetshop window.
We took off again late that afternoon and put down at Croydon about seven o’clock. The skipper, who had promised me lunch in London that day, was only five hours out on his calculation.
Flying across southern England, I wondered where Richard was and how soon I might see him. After all, I couldn’t expect the American Navy to adjust its plans to allow one of its lieutenant commanders to be at Croydon to meet his wife. But, being a woman, I couldn’t help wishing.
In the excitement of actually recognizing the big, familiar field just below us, I bounced in my seat—and promptly broke two of the precious eggs in my lap.
“My God, woman,” said Hemingway, helping me clean up the mess, “what are you going to do now?”
“Fortunately, I’m the same shape front and back,” I told him. I jerked my tweed skirt around so that the egg stain was behind me, buttoned my fur coat, and assured myself, as I tripped down the gangplank, that I was making as neat an entrance as any in my career.
It was eight o’clock, the dinner hour, when I drove up to the dear familiar Savoy. It was not yet dark, just the beloved twilight, yet London’s streets were strangely quiet and free of traffic. There were great gaps in the familiar skyline and piles of rubble along the streets we drove through. All the way over I had been steeling myself for this, my first view of bombed London. I knew it was going to be hard to take. There was bound to be that wrenching struggle between the impulse to cry out and the feeling that one simply dared not give way to one’s feelings. London is my home town. I was born there in Kennington Oval. I grew up within the sound of Bow Bells. I spoke with a cockney accent until I was eleven or thereabouts, when Miss Italia Conti scolded and drilled me out of it. In London I have been by turns poor and rich, hopeful and despondent, successful and down and out, utterly miserable and ecstatically, dizzily happy. I belong to London as each of us can belong to only one place on this earth. And, in the same way, London belongs to me.
The windows of my room at the Savoy looked out over the Thames Embankment. After a solitary dinner, as I stood there looking down, I had my first sharp realization of what war had done to my town. An impenetrable black curtain seemed to have fallen between me and the city. The enveloping blackness in which the stars seemed unreally bright and near and the unusual, wary, listening stillness were more impressive at that moment than the destruction wrought by the bombs. They filled me with a swift, blinding fury against the enemy who could muffle the voice and force of the greatest and most tolerant city in the world. Suddenly the silence overhead was cut by the whir of flying planes. They were our bombers starting out for targets across the Channel. The sound carried me back to World War I, when we used to be glad of nights such as this, when there was no moon to guide the Zeppelins up the winding Thames to drop their death freight on us.
On such a night...
Suddenly, as against a black-velvet backdrop, the past came back to me, and I saw myself as a little girl, dancing on a sidewalk in Clapham....
Clapham is not the least desirable of London’s many widely sprawled districts. Clapham is “genteel.” Dwellers in other suburban districts of London speak enviously of their better-off cousins and in-laws who are privileged to live in Clapham, London S.W. For them—and they include thousands of tried-and-true Londoners—Clapham is something to aspire to.
Residents of Clapham speak of these less-favored boroughs with no more than the faintest tinge of superiority. For if there is one thing which every true Claphamite knows and will swear to, it is that employment is full of uncertainties and life is a matter of ups and downs. His attitude toward the dwellers in the East End is that of the humble apostle; but for the grace of God, there go I.
Clapham has its own code, its own proper pride, and its own firmly rooted conventions. For one thing, it is very bad form, indeed, to ask questions. Of course you can’t help being aware of certain facts about your neighbors: the hours they keep, who is in or out of work, whose husband spends more of his free time at the corner pub than he spends with his family, and what they buy at the butcher’s and greengrocer’s. Good form, however, demands a pretense that you know none of these things. If one of your neighbors suddenly disappears overnight, bag and baggage, you are properly surprised about it the next morning, even though you did hear the bailiff’s voice in the hall and the stamping made by the men from the hire-purchase company as they carried out the furniture.
If you were brought up in Clapham, as I was, you don’t have to be informed of these nice points of etiquette. You grow up knowing them. “Don’t be nosy,” Mother would say. And Dad would add: “It doesn’t pay to see everything, my girl.”
Mother hadn’t always lived in Clapham, and Kennington Oval was a step down for her. Her father had been a master builder—a man of substance in his own line, whose fortune, however, had been lost in “gilt-edged” securities. Granny still lived in the same house to which she had moved as a young bride, where her children were born, and where, she stoutly affirmed, she intended, “God willing, my dear,” to die. Mother had taken the step down when she allowed the unexplained romantic streak in her nature to make her deaf to the dictates of her class. Following that will-o’-the-wisp, she married for love with a blind disregard for economic security—married, of all things, a theatrical! And a foreigner at that. Even though he had come to England at the age of two, he was a Dane whose professional name was Arthur Lawrence. He sang in a deep, rich basso profundo, and with a dramatic fervor that went down very well with audiences at smoking concerts and in the smaller music halls. He rendered such favorites as “Old Black Joe” and “Asleep in the Deep.” His “Drinking Song” was famous throughout Brixton and Shepherd’s Bush. Alas!
Mother had been very carefully brought up. “All the time your father courted me we never once were out together after ten o’clock. I’m sure I don’t know what your grandfather would have said if I had not been home and on my way to bed when the clock struck that hour.”
So much decorum must have been a great strain on my father, accustomed as he was to the hours kept by the profession. Perhaps something in his Danish nature responded to this strict middle-class propriety. His family, the Klasens, were a solid, respectable lot—and he was the only one of them with a taste for anything so Bohemian as the stage.
Mother’s family shook their heads over the future of such a marriage, and they were quite right about it. My father liked his glass, and an evening dedicated to bass solos gives a man a thirst. He was—as I was to learn—one of those whose personality was completely altered by alcohol. His gaiety, his charm, his blond good looks disappeared. He became ugly in disposition and demeanor. Mother left him soon after I was born. I grew up with no memories and no knowledge of him. But I adored Dad, my stepfather.
No wonder Granny shook her head over Mother, who just couldn’t seem to learn about men. Mother chose her two husbands for their charm, not for their ability to provide. Father had always been able to sing for our supper, but Dad was always promising to provide handsomely. “Wait,” he would say to us. “Just let me back a winner....” When he did, we would celebrate with a slap-up feast—boiled salmon, or a bird, toasted cheese, and a side dish of prawns. And, occasionally, asparagus. The first time we had this delicacy, I remember, Mother cut off all the green tips and boiled the white stalks.
Gertrude Alexandra Dagmar Lawrence Klasen—little Gertie Lawrence to you—was quite satisfied with Kennington Oval. For one thing, the organ-grinder came there frequently and would pause and grind out a tune on each side of the Oval, which gave the residents a fair-sized concert. I never could resist him, nor could I learn to be a proper child and satisfy myself with opening the window a crack to let the music come into the room.
“Where is that child?” Mother would ask. One look from the window was enough. There I was, following the music, holding out my brief skirts and dancing to what I hoped was the admiration of the neighbors.
Nobody that I know of had taught me to dance. The steps just seemed to come to me the minute my ears caught the music. But Mother loved “musical evenings,” and my first song, learned from a sheet of free music cut from a newspaper, went like this:
Oh, it ain’t all honey, and it ain’t all jam,Walking round the ‘ouses with a three-wheel pram,All on me lonesome, not a bit to eat,Walking about on me poor old feet.My old man, if I could find ‘im,A lesson I would give.Poor old me, I ‘aven’t got a key,And I don’t know where I live.Boom! Boom!
Whenever we had company, on a Sunday night, I would be made to oblige with a song. “Gertie’s such a funny one!” Dad would puff out his chest, proud of my accomplishment.
“Fancy! A child her age singing songs like that!”
“Whatever will she do next? She ought to go on the stage. She’s got it in her.”
That song brought me the first money I ever earned. The summer I was six Dad must have had a streak of unusual good luck with the horses because he took Mother and me to Bognor Regis for the bank holiday. It was boiling hot, I remember, and the sands were crowded. I had never been to the sea before; the bathers, the picnic parties on the sand, the strollers along the Front fascinated me. A concert party was entertaining, and Dad paid for us to go in. At the close of the regular bill the “funny man” came forward and invited anyone in the audience who cared to, to come up on the stage and entertain the crowd. A push from Mother and the command: “Go on now, Gertie, and sing your song,” was all the urging I needed. “ It ain’t all honey, and it ain’t all jam,” I caroled lightly, twirling on my toes with my skimpy pink frock held out as far as it would stretch. The applause and the cheers were gratifying, even without the large golden sovereign which the manager presented to me after a little speech.
I know I must have told this story to Noel Coward. No doubt I boasted of it when we were both pupils at Miss Conti’s dancing school. The incident may have given him the idea for one of the scenes in Cavalcade. In fact, when I saw the play, there was something so familiar about that little girl doing her song and dance on the Brighton sands, the little girl who grew up to be an actress, that I felt a rush of tears and a choke in my throat. She made me remember, suddenly, so many things I thought I had forgotten.
One other thing makes that holiday at Bognor Regis stand out in my mind. We were living in lodgings, of course. Late one Sunday afternoon Mother told Dad to take me for a walk along the Front while she got our supper ready. Dad and I walked about for a bit, enjoying the crowds; then I noticed that his steps began to drag and he began to cast longing eyes at the saloon doors from which, now that they were open again, came the cool, sour smell of beer. Finally, he could stand it no longer.
“Sit down on that bench, Gertie,” he said. “You can have a nice look at the sea and the people going by. Be a good girl, now, and don’t move until I come back for you.”
I watched him disappear in the direction of the nearest bar. I was not disconcerted. Obediently I sat on the bench, swinging my legs and enjoying my freedom. Even more than the sea and the crowd, I was interested in a stand where a sign announced bicycles for hire. That drew me as inevitably as the saloon had drawn Dad.
“How much does it cost to hire a bike?” I asked the attendant
“Sixpence an hour, my dear.”
I felt around in my coat pocket and produced the coin. The attendant looked at me a bit doubtfully, but the sixpence was real enough and there in the rack was a bike just my size. He took it out and lifted me up on the saddle.
“That will do you a fair treat,” he said. “Now be sure you bring it back in an hour.” He turned away to wait on another customer.
I wheeled the machine proudly across the Front and down a street into a crescent where the railings in front of the houses gave me something to hold onto. I had never been on a cycle before, but I had no doubt of my ability to ride one. I leaned it against the railing, paying no attention to the sign which read, “Fresh Paint,” mounted it, and, holding onto the railing with one hand, managed to pedal around the crescent. It was thrilling, like riding a circus horse around the ring, and there was always the possibility that the people were watching me from the windows of the houses. I fell off several times, skinned my knee, and got the front of my frock grubby while the side toward the railings became ornamented with stripes of green paint, but I kept at it, getting better with each lap. I had forgotten Dad and Mother, even the admonition of the attendant at the bicycle stand to be back within an hour.
It was getting dusk before Dad found me, a frantic, red-faced, frightened Dad, who had already spent some time running up and down the Front calling, “Gertie! Gertie!” and demanding of everyone, “Have you seen my little girl anywhere about?”
His relief at sight of me was immediately transformed into anger for the fright I had caused him. “Now, then, whatever have you been up to? You’d ought to be ashamed of yourself running off like that! Such a fright you’ve given me! Whatever would I have said to your mother? She won’t half give you a piece of her mind when she sees what you’ve done to your frock! And it’s your poor dad will get the worst of it.”
He went on, muttering and scolding, all the way back to the bicycle stand where he paid the attendant for the over-time. And still clutching me by the hand, as though afraid I would vanish again, he hurried me back to our lodgings. We were nearly there when he stopped, removed his hat, and wiped his brow. Giving me a long look that immediately established a confidence between us, he remarked tentatively, “I don’t know. How would it be if we were to take your mother a little gin and bitters to have with her supper?”
I nodded approval.
“Wait here, then. And none of your vanishing acts, my girl!”
He stepped jauntily into the convenient door of a refreshment bar. After a few minutes he emerged, wiping his mustache and looking very much more like himself. He patted one bulging pocket: “Your mother always did fancy a gin and bitters. Your mother’s a wonderful woman, Gertie. Don’t you ever forget it!”
No, I promised myself. Somehow or other I felt that I now had two allies against Mother’s anger when she discovered the state of my dress. Dad, I felt, would be on my side and could be counted on to bring up the reinforcements—namely the gin and bitters—at the psychological moment.
Dad’s admiration for Mother was unbounded, and his devotion was as great as his admiration. Whenever they had a tiff, he would feel moved to tell me solemnly that it was all his fault. He appreciated Mother’s fine qualities, and he would lecture me on the subject of showing the same appreciation.
“Mind you always do as your mother tells you to, my girl. Your mother’s a wonderful woman. Just you try to be like her, and you won’t go far wrong.”
There was nothing sentimental about Mother, nor about her determination to bring me up according to her standards. She saw to it that I came straight home from school each day and that I did the household tasks that were assigned to me. One of these was blacking the fire grates. As Mother said, there was something about a well-blacked grate that gave a room an air. It may be that this helped her morale and compensated for some of the instability of her life with Dad. Each of us has some sort of pet fetish, something we cling to which gives us self-confidence and power to go on. A neat, well-blacked fireplace was Mother’s. If she had blacked the grates herself, she would have missed the satisfaction of feeling that she was bringing up her daughter in the proper tradition. So I blacked the grates each day. And on Saturdays I did the brass and helped in general.
It was not sentimentality but a fierce pride for herself and for Dad that made Mother put me into ruffled frocks which were a bother to make and to wash and iron. And what a nuisance they were for me to keep clean! It seemed as though some mischievous fate led me into trouble as soon as I was sent out, freshly bathed and dressed, with strict orders to “walk around the pond and try to act like a lady.” It wasn’t that I deliberately tried to misbehave, but that life would not let me follow Mother’s command. It would hold out some other inducement to me, something I could not refuse. Before I knew it I would be engaged in sailing boats on the pond, getting wetter and muddier every minute, or making friends with some stray mongrel puppy whose playful paws had no regard for my starched ruffles.
“Why can’t you be like your cousin Ruby!” Mother would scold.
My cousin was all that I was not—she was a plump, pretty, neat child with curls hanging to her waist; my hair was lank and as straight as a die. My cousin Ruby was always spotless and without a wrinkle. Her nails were clean. She was the pride of the family, and she knew it. Her father, my mother’s brother, was in charge of the Royal Stables at Buckingham Palace, which gave Ruby a prestige. “Just look at your cousin,” Mother would say. “She is such a credit to her parents, it’s a pleasure to watch her come into a room. Here I spend hours on making you look nice and it lasts until you’re out of sight. I declare, Gertie, you’ve got the very devil in you.”
I think Mother always regretted losing the world in which she had lived briefly with my father—the world of the theater. In a slightly discolored mother-of-pearl card case she treasured a number of visiting cards of actresses she had known in those days. Sometimes, as a treat, she would let me play with them. I would pull a card out of the case, read the name aloud, and she would immediately launch into the story of how she and the owner of the card met and where, what her specialty was, and Mother’s own opinion of how good she was at it. This parlor game gave me my first inside information on the theatrical profession. One of the things I learned was that Friday was “professional night” at most of the theaters. On Friday night it was usual to admit members of the profession free. By the time I was eight or nine, I had learned the trick of writing neatly across the face of any one of the cards, “Please give my little girl two seats.” If Mother was out that evening, I would take the card, call for one of my little girl friends, and together we would take the tram to Brixton or any near-by district where there was a theater. I would present myself and my card at the box office. The man would look through the wicket at me a little doubtfully, whereupon I would put on my most innocent and pleading look. Usually someone hanging about would say: “Oh, give the kids a couple of seats.” We would skip in and find places in the gallery.
After the show we would take the tram home, hoping desperately to get there before our mothers found us out. Once, I remember, either the tram was delayed or Mother came home from Granny’s earlier than usual. She found the other little girl’s mother hammering at our door.
“Your Gertie came and took my Mabel!” she cried.
“They’re not back yet.”
Mother did not put off whipping me to ask too many questions. After the punishment, she began to inquire into our evening. What shocked her most of all was our riding to and from Brixton on the tram.
“Did you speak to anyone?” she demanded.
“A gentleman spoke to me.”
“How do you know he was a gentleman?” Mother asked suspiciously.
“Because he was wearing a gold watch and chain!”
Strangely, this seemed to satisfy her as completely as it had satisfied me.
The rooms on Kennington Oval marked the high tide of our finances. We lived there only as long as luck was with Dad. Then we moved, as we frequently did. There was a regular ritual connected with these movings which varied only as we moved up or down in the economic scale. If the move was occasioned by good fortune, Mother added a piano to the furniture she ordered sent around to the new address. There was something undeniably genteel about a piano in the house, even if no one could play it.
If the move was in the other direction, a van drove up and men smelling of sawdust and beer carried away the piano and the rest of the furniture which we had on the hire-purchase plan. They were quite impersonal about it; they gave you to understand that their orders to take away the tables and chairs and the sideboard with the mirror at the back came from the company. Mother was always on her dignity with them. She refused to be commiserated with. In her own way she contrived to imply a disdain for the household chattels over which there was such an unaccountable to-do. The impersonal air with which she watched the men from the Hire Furniture Company stagger down the front steps under the pseudo-Jacobean fumed-oak dresser was a triumph of dramatic genius. As the rooms became emptier, you felt that Mother was merely clearing her decks for bolder action, and that when we had furniture again, it would be on a nobler, more elegant scale.
Meanwhile Dad would have slipped ‘round the corner and entered into negotiations with the neighborhood greengrocer whose account had been paid up and whose friendship could therefore be relied upon. Not until after dark, when there would be no prying eyes, would Mother take down the window curtains and pack the few possessions rightfully our own and which remained constant through all the changes for better or for worse—the bedding, though not the beds, the kitchen pots and pans, the square black marble-and-gilt clock with the figure of Britannia resting on her shield staring pensively at a beast which resembled a poodle more than a lion, the pair of gaily-flowered Royal Worcester vases which always flanked the clock above every hearth we gathered round, and a red glass mug engraved with the date of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
Close on to midnight the grocer’s boy would arrive with his cart. Dad would tiptoe down the stairs with the parcels and baskets and pile them on the cart while the boy leaned against the railing and kept a lookout for “Nosy Parkers.” In all this there was nothing original; we were merely following a tradition long recognized in Clapham and in other less-favored districts. This maneuver was known in the vernacular as a “moonlight flit.” Obviously, it was a move to cheaper lodgings in another district where we and our straitened circumstances were as yet unknown. Also, obviously, it was without the landlord’s knowledge.
There must have been families whose moonlight flits were sad and shamefaced. Not ours. There was something daring and whimsical about this sort of move which challenged all that was adventurous in our three natures. Each of us responded to the challenge differently; each in his own way.
Mother always dressed up to the nines for the occasion. She would skewer her largest birded hat atop her puffs, twine a marabou boa elegantly about her neck, and draw on a pair of long, worn, but carefully mended gray gloves. Catching up her skirt with one hand and carrying the tea-kettle in the other, she would sweep down the stairs with a dignity calculated to overpower any lurking landlord.
In Dad, jauntiness rose over dignity. He would cock his bowler at an angle, and thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, he would chaff the grocer’s boy, making him a partner in the adventure.
At a signal from Dad the boy would push off with his cart, Dad would gallantly offer Mother his arm, and they would follow. I would bring up the rear of the little procession. So we moved through Clapham’s silent streets, pioneers setting forth into the unknown to start a new home in a new and untried land. The adventure tingled in my toes. Where the moon or a street lamp splashed the pavement with light, my feet would begin to dance....
