Episode 13 - Knives and forks

Upstairs, downstairs

I’m Gillian Richmond. I’ve spent more than thirty years writing for UK stage, TV and radio. People often ask me how I got started. This is part 13 of the episodic story. Parts 1-12 are still available for free.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

Previously on This Writer’s Journey…

My play Ellen has attracted some attention. The Soho Poly Theatre literary manager has invited me to join his writers’ group and the Royal Court literary team have invited me in for a meeting - which could possibly lead to a commission. I am still teaching full time in a deprived area of London.

Writing a story. You begin by thinking you’re in charge, but then, if you’re lucky, the narrative takes the wheel and you have to let go.

It’s one of the reasons I’m wary of screenwriting theory. Three, five, seven act structures, turning points here, turning points there, jeopardy, jeopardy, jeopardy - this stuff might help when you’re editing, but it only gets in the way when a story is still trying to find its way. Overthinking can’t breathe life into a narrative that isn’t allowed to grow organically. Plan too much in advance and you’re in danger of sucking out the soul before the story has a chance to be born.

Sucking out the soul? Isn’t that a bit woo?

Woo or not, it’s true. As I was to discover when I was writing my next play, The Last Waltz, the play that catapulted me into a writing career that has lasted a very long time.

But I’m rushing ahead. I’ll be talking more about writing that play in a week or two.

Monday morning after the Riverside Studios readings of my play Ellen, and I’m back in the classroom. It’s a relief to be with the kids, and to allow the theatre adrenalin to dissolve into the daily reality of school.

The meeting with the Royal Court is set for a Thursday. Thursday is my double playground duty day, when I spend morning and afternoon breaks in the school yard with my whistle. That particular Thursday is damp and my hair, never silky, has gone frizzy. I know this shouldn’t matter.

I also know that this is a meeting I can’t afford to mess up. But I still don’t have an idea that I want to offer them. Everything that’s come into my head has felt like porridge. As I follow the stage door keeper up the stairs to the admin offices, I reckon I’ll just have to busk my way through.

Turns out I don’t need to.

While I’m trying to decipher the titles on the spines of the scripts that cram the bowing shelves of the office, Hilary Salmon cuts across the small talk. Tell us about yourself, she says. Where are you from?

I’m from nowhere, I tell her.

Everyone’s from somewhere, she says.

I shrug. I was an army child, I grew up travelling around the world. We followed my Dad’s job.

Wow, the three literary managers chorus, that must have been weird.

No, I think. As a kid you only know the life you know. Other people have weird lives, not you.

Yeah, I say. It was pretty weird, but even weirder for my Mum, living in my Dad’s shadow, with no identity of her own.

Tell us more, they say.

I describe the life of moving house every couple of years. The challenge for my mother of dealing with my brother and me when we screamed at her that we didn’t want to move schools and leave our friends. Her sadness at having to leave her own friends behind. The stress of ‘marching-out’ from the old ‘married quarter’ (aka our home) and ‘marching-in’ to the new. The dread of the marching-out inspection, when the Families’ Officer would examine every corner, every skirting board, every door knob, and issue a hefty fine if everything wasn’t immaculate. When I was growing up, no matter where in the world we were living, my mum was always terrified of the Families’ Officer. His marching-out inspection was the stuff of her nightmares.

I go on to talk about the army’s ranking system, the small, but critical, gradations of status between one rank and the next, and then the enormous gulf between the commissioned officers and their wives and the other-ranks and their wives. The upstairs and the downstairs. The haves and the have-nots. The us and the them. I describe the humiliation of the ‘knife and fork’ course that my dad (a grown man in his forties, a respected sergeant-major) was compelled to attend when he was promoted to the officer class, in order to be taught the ‘correct’ ways to behave. I describe my mum’s delight at being allocated a bigger house with a separate dining room and a downstairs toilet, set against her social anxiety, the nagging feeling that she wasn’t good enough, that the other officers’ wives were looking down on her.

That’s a play they’d like to see, they say.

And I realise, just like that, it’s a play I want to write. That it’s a play I need to write.

The three literary managers look at each other. One of the men gives the tiniest shake of his head. Hilary turns to me. When she speaks, she sounds regretful. I’m too new and risky for a full commission, she tells me. But they can offer four hundred pounds and call it a ‘research grant’.

In today’s money, £400 is somewhere around £1200-£1300.

I spend the money on a Commodore 64 computer.

The portable telly from Wales is reincarnated as my monitor and I delve into my savings for a screechy dot matrix printer.

It was a huge thing back then for a writer to own a computer. Believe me when I tell you this: I was extremely cutting edge.

The Royal Court is calling their money a research grant, so maybe I should do some research. I write to the notoriously secretive Ministry of Defence. Maybe it’s the mention of the ‘Royal’ Court, maybe it’s the fact that my father used to be in the army, but extraordinary as it seems now, someone from the MOD press department calls me and sets up a meeting with a Families’ Officer at a military camp on Salisbury Plain.

School finishes for the summer. Normally, after the holidays the class would be moving on to another teacher, but the Head, Mr M, is experimenting with keeping children with the same teacher throughout their time in the juniors. Some of the teachers are moaning about this. Not me. I’ve grown fond of the kids in my care.

On the last day of term Caroline and Gaynor sidle up to my desk and give me a card they’ve made. They’ve signed it with love. As they run, giggling, from the classoom it turns out I have something in my eye.

The following week, on a warm morning in late July, I drive out of London and head south-west, to the checkpoint of an army barracks, where I present my credentials to a scowling squaddie holding a gun.

The Families’ Officer welcomes me into his small, bare office. His Sam Browne belt, the mark of an officer in the UK army, gleams across his chest. His face and nose are flushed. He looks to be in his late forties. Congenial and chatty, he holds the rank of Major. It’s not a high-status job, and he’s almost certainly been commissioned from the ranks. He describes himself to me as ‘the families’ friend’.

The Families’ Friend?

Not sure what my mum would make of that.

The names of the children mentioned in this piece have been changed