don’t be foolish, dear’ – some such words – ‘Bea must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’ But she hadn’t; that was the amazing thing. It was all about to come true.
The next thing was to beg, persuade and implore my parents to let me visit Beatrix while the filming was taking place. By a great stroke of good fortune it was scheduled to start in August, during the school holidays. My mother and father had been planning to take me camping for a week, near Rhyl in North Wales, but I was already dreading it. (Can you imagine what the thought of it must have seemed like, to a sixteen-year-old girl?) Anyway, it was not difficult to dissuade them. It was agreed that I should go to stay with Beatrix and Roger instead, so I had the delicious prospect of a whole week in Much Wenlock to look forward to, while the filming was in full flow.
In the meantime I found out everything I could about the forthcoming production – which was next to nothing. I went to my local library and could find no references to it at all in the current newspapers or magazines. The best I could do was to borrow a copy of the novel upon which the film, apparently, was to be based. I devoured it in a couple of sittings and then reread it and then reread it again. I have not read it since, I must admit: my taste for that sort of overheated rustic melodrama has abated somewhat. At the time I thought it entrancing. It’s the story of an ignorant country girl who marries the village chaplain but meanwhile gets caught up in a torrid affair with the local squire, while quite sensibly preferring her pet fox to either of them. At the climax she comes to a sticky end by falling down a mineshaft. I suppose that now most people would consider it silly stuff, but at the time I loved it, for being rooted in the Shropshire landscape, saturated with the colours and contours of its hills, and the author’s feeling for nature is still what I remember best. There were some beautiful passages.
Anyway, all of that – like so much else – is neither here nor there. In July there was a letter from Beatrix which contained all sorts of exciting news. Some members of the crew were already starting to arrive, including the actor who was going to play the squire. His name was David Farrar, and Beatrix didn’t really know who he was, but one of her friends had seen him once in a film about nuns (another one: nuns were very popular in those days, cinematically speaking) and thought he was really ‘dishy’ (I believe that was the word), and then just the week before, when she – this friend – had been cycling along the road to Wellington, she had seen him coming down the same road in the opposite direction, riding a horse! She had almost fallen off her bicycle with the shock. Another thing Beatrix told me was that a notice had gone up in the market hall at Much Wenlock, saying that they needed all sorts of help with the film: they needed craftsmen and carpenters to help build the sets, and they needed good riders to be in the hunting scenes, and they needed lots of extras just to come along and be in some of the street scenes, and anyone could come and take part so long as they were able to bring their own costumes, which should be at least fifty or sixty years old. And Beatrix told me that upstairs at Warden Farm, somewhere in one of the attics, there were all these trunks and chests full of clothes that had belonged to Ivy’s mother, Agatha, and she was going to go over and look through them and find some dresses that were suitable for both of us to wear, if she could.
Roger himself professed no interest in any of these doings. He gave us to understand that it was all so much female frippery, in his opinion. I thought this rather odd at first – he was not by any means immune to glamour, after all – until Beatrix informed me that her husband was already quite preoccupied, being fully absorbed in an affair with a neighbour who lived two or three
The next thing was to beg, persuade and implore my parents to let me visit Beatrix while the filming was taking place. By a great stroke of good fortune it was scheduled to start in August, during the school holidays. My mother and father had been planning to take me camping for a week, near Rhyl in North Wales, but I was already dreading it. (Can you imagine what the thought of it must have seemed like, to a sixteen-year-old girl?) Anyway, it was not difficult to dissuade them. It was agreed that I should go to stay with Beatrix and Roger instead, so I had the delicious prospect of a whole week in Much Wenlock to look forward to, while the filming was in full flow.
In the meantime I found out everything I could about the forthcoming production – which was next to nothing. I went to my local library and could find no references to it at all in the current newspapers or magazines. The best I could do was to borrow a copy of the novel upon which the film, apparently, was to be based. I devoured it in a couple of sittings and then reread it and then reread it again. I have not read it since, I must admit: my taste for that sort of overheated rustic melodrama has abated somewhat. At the time I thought it entrancing. It’s the story of an ignorant country girl who marries the village chaplain but meanwhile gets caught up in a torrid affair with the local squire, while quite sensibly preferring her pet fox to either of them. At the climax she comes to a sticky end by falling down a mineshaft. I suppose that now most people would consider it silly stuff, but at the time I loved it, for being rooted in the Shropshire landscape, saturated with the colours and contours of its hills, and the author’s feeling for nature is still what I remember best. There were some beautiful passages.
Anyway, all of that – like so much else – is neither here nor there. In July there was a letter from Beatrix which contained all sorts of exciting news. Some members of the crew were already starting to arrive, including the actor who was going to play the squire. His name was David Farrar, and Beatrix didn’t really know who he was, but one of her friends had seen him once in a film about nuns (another one: nuns were very popular in those days, cinematically speaking) and thought he was really ‘dishy’ (I believe that was the word), and then just the week before, when she – this friend – had been cycling along the road to Wellington, she had seen him coming down the same road in the opposite direction, riding a horse! She had almost fallen off her bicycle with the shock. Another thing Beatrix told me was that a notice had gone up in the market hall at Much Wenlock, saying that they needed all sorts of help with the film: they needed craftsmen and carpenters to help build the sets, and they needed good riders to be in the hunting scenes, and they needed lots of extras just to come along and be in some of the street scenes, and anyone could come and take part so long as they were able to bring their own costumes, which should be at least fifty or sixty years old. And Beatrix told me that upstairs at Warden Farm, somewhere in one of the attics, there were all these trunks and chests full of clothes that had belonged to Ivy’s mother, Agatha, and she was going to go over and look through them and find some dresses that were suitable for both of us to wear, if she could.
Roger himself professed no interest in any of these doings. He gave us to understand that it was all so much female frippery, in his opinion. I thought this rather odd at first – he was not by any means immune to glamour, after all – until Beatrix informed me that her husband was already quite preoccupied, being fully absorbed in an affair with a neighbour who lived two or three
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