myself. Dan and I looked at each other and I’m sure he felt exactly the same. The other shock was that the vast majority of the boys were straight. Only four of us fitted into the theatrical stereotype.
We sat in the tiny coffee shop making small talk and looking at hundreds of fading 8 × 10 photographs of ex-students. Although we all pretended to care about the craft of acting, it was obvious that all any of us really wanted was to be famous, so it was slightly worrying that we only recognised about four of the students. The only person who seemed to know all their names was Betty, the tea lady who served behind the counter. It seems deeply ironic that sweet, unassuming Betty is now more famous than most of the school’s past pupils.
Once I got into the rhythm of going to school every dayand working a couple of nights a week at Smiths, I loved it. There is no doubt about it, drama school is the most self-indulgent thing in the world. Each morning I’d wake up and wonder what I would be doing that day and then remember, ‘Oh yes, thinking about myself.’
Ashley left on a Sunday night. We had a big gathering of our friends at lunchtime and then Ashley and I headed out to Heathrow. Airports are so deceptive. On the surface they are just vast, impersonal concourses full of shiny floors and bland art, but they are in fact enormous emotional hotpots. Everyone who walks into an airport is in some sort of heightened emotional state. The terror of flying, the excitement of a holiday, the sadness of leaving, there seems to be an amnesty for dressing and behaving like the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest . I don’t think Ashley actually laughed, but he couldn’t disguise how thrilled he was to be going home. I did well in the ‘keeping it together’ department until the very moment when I waved him through the departure gates and turned to leave. I walked through Heathrow bawling like a baby who has just realised that its favourite toy has fallen out of the pram. The tears lasted off and on for most of the tube ride home.
Of course most people would have dragged themselves to work the next day and stared numbly at a computer screen for eight hours, but I was going to drama school. We were doing a poetry performance showcase that morning, and with my freshly acquired grief I knew I was going to be marvellous. I practically skipped down the road. Sure enough, about three lines into Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’ (long before Simon Callow’s funeral in Four Weddings) , I was in tears. Every cloud . . .
By now I was twenty-four and one of the older people in my year. The other students my age seemed to have spent their whole lives in education, and so I found myself feeling very worldly and, because of my restaurant job, relatively rich. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t happy and that I was living my life in mourning for Ashley, who had morphed in my memory into the first Antipodean saint.
I was now renting a huge room in a flat in Swiss Cottage with two women who had put up a card on the school noticeboard. It became clear that one of the women, Ann, was very much in charge. She had lived in the flat for years and we all abided by her slightly eccentric rules. She was deeply committed to healthy living and was a strict vegetarian. She religiously used her water filter jug, in fact she used it so much that she had never had a chance to wash it. The grimy, scum-covered plastic jug sat on a shelf, and the other lodger Helen and I would walk past it pulling faces of horror. When my mother came to visit, she took one look at it and summed it up perfectly: ‘A water filter? A fish couldn’t live in that.’ Also Ann had a budgie that lived in the living room. I don’t know what sort of Herculean bird this was, but it seemed to be capable of throwing food and shit nine or ten feet across the room so that the room was less like a lounge and more like an enormous birdcage. It wasn’t ideal. Added to
We sat in the tiny coffee shop making small talk and looking at hundreds of fading 8 × 10 photographs of ex-students. Although we all pretended to care about the craft of acting, it was obvious that all any of us really wanted was to be famous, so it was slightly worrying that we only recognised about four of the students. The only person who seemed to know all their names was Betty, the tea lady who served behind the counter. It seems deeply ironic that sweet, unassuming Betty is now more famous than most of the school’s past pupils.
Once I got into the rhythm of going to school every dayand working a couple of nights a week at Smiths, I loved it. There is no doubt about it, drama school is the most self-indulgent thing in the world. Each morning I’d wake up and wonder what I would be doing that day and then remember, ‘Oh yes, thinking about myself.’
Ashley left on a Sunday night. We had a big gathering of our friends at lunchtime and then Ashley and I headed out to Heathrow. Airports are so deceptive. On the surface they are just vast, impersonal concourses full of shiny floors and bland art, but they are in fact enormous emotional hotpots. Everyone who walks into an airport is in some sort of heightened emotional state. The terror of flying, the excitement of a holiday, the sadness of leaving, there seems to be an amnesty for dressing and behaving like the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest . I don’t think Ashley actually laughed, but he couldn’t disguise how thrilled he was to be going home. I did well in the ‘keeping it together’ department until the very moment when I waved him through the departure gates and turned to leave. I walked through Heathrow bawling like a baby who has just realised that its favourite toy has fallen out of the pram. The tears lasted off and on for most of the tube ride home.
Of course most people would have dragged themselves to work the next day and stared numbly at a computer screen for eight hours, but I was going to drama school. We were doing a poetry performance showcase that morning, and with my freshly acquired grief I knew I was going to be marvellous. I practically skipped down the road. Sure enough, about three lines into Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’ (long before Simon Callow’s funeral in Four Weddings) , I was in tears. Every cloud . . .
By now I was twenty-four and one of the older people in my year. The other students my age seemed to have spent their whole lives in education, and so I found myself feeling very worldly and, because of my restaurant job, relatively rich. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t happy and that I was living my life in mourning for Ashley, who had morphed in my memory into the first Antipodean saint.
I was now renting a huge room in a flat in Swiss Cottage with two women who had put up a card on the school noticeboard. It became clear that one of the women, Ann, was very much in charge. She had lived in the flat for years and we all abided by her slightly eccentric rules. She was deeply committed to healthy living and was a strict vegetarian. She religiously used her water filter jug, in fact she used it so much that she had never had a chance to wash it. The grimy, scum-covered plastic jug sat on a shelf, and the other lodger Helen and I would walk past it pulling faces of horror. When my mother came to visit, she took one look at it and summed it up perfectly: ‘A water filter? A fish couldn’t live in that.’ Also Ann had a budgie that lived in the living room. I don’t know what sort of Herculean bird this was, but it seemed to be capable of throwing food and shit nine or ten feet across the room so that the room was less like a lounge and more like an enormous birdcage. It wasn’t ideal. Added to
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