MEMOIR: A Tug on the ThreadBy Diana Quick Virago
‘ALWAYS DO what your parents tell you, and make sure you marry a pure-blooded Englishman.”
Her grandfather’s grim admonition puzzled the young Diana, but it was only when her father died suddenly and was buried with the full rites, “even though he’d never once mentioned he was Roman Catholic”, that her curiosity was fully piqued. She was up at Oxford when it happened, blessed with intelligence and a big dramatic talent, only to collapse with severe jaundice months after her papa’s untimely death. Describing how she surfaced briefly from her coma to hear a doctor’s voice saying, “You must prepare yourself Mrs Quick, she may not survive the night”, Diana remarks that such an early brush with mortality gave her both pause for thought and those wonderful cheekbones (she lost three stone) that transformed her into a bona fide beauty.
Something, quite rightly, she admits being delighted by. A mere bat squeak of vanity and the only one she allows herself in this scholarly foray into the forces that shaped her. Given the plethora of self-serving celebrity memoirs on offer, the lack of ego in her writing is hugely refreshing. Those expecting a tell-all tale of an actor whose consorts include some pretty famous names will, happily, be disappointed. Well able to make judicious use of her experience in both film and theatre to inform the narrative when she chooses, it’s to her credit that reticence rules when it comes to matters of her own heart.
For a time back there in the 1970s Diana and I soldiered together at London’s National Theatre, but no more than the minute gradations of rank and office that underpinned the Quick family history in India, so were our differences defined. She was playing a lead; I was understudying Susan Fleetwood, which really annoyed this Irish upstart – certain sure I could play Pegeen Mike in my sleep. Thus I have a touch of empathy with her early forebear, a young artilleryman enlisted under a pseudonym; in fact her first stroke of luck was in finding him at all. Christopher Quick (alias Tom Jones) was of such utter insignificance in the greater scheme of things that excavating his origins gave his great-granddaughter an excellent entrée into the plight of the common soldier in a hostile clime “facing disease, boredom, poverty and drunkenness”. No mean feat to weave individual frustration and regret into the context of a socio-political milieu at such a far remove from her own, and in doing so to sympathetically trace the psychological effects on her family through four generations.
Apart from being surprised by her father’s hidden Catholicism, Diana’s own exotic looks bespoke what they used to call “a touch of the tar brush”, which in turn leads her to explore the sexual politics of racism and class prejudice that the builders of Empire much preferred to ignore. Tracing the lineage of Christopher’s wife Margaret Kerr, née Johnstone, a young widow, she discovers that Meg’s grandfather married Lakshmi, a native of Calcutta, whose name was later anglicised to “Lucky”. This appears to have remained a source of shame in that she was not of “pure English blood”, which obviously rankled with Diana’s grandfather and was never quite forgiven or forgotten.
In disentangling the threads of her own origins she's done a magnificent service to the history of women in India. Between memsahiband native and without the protection of rank or status there existed thousands of women subject to the many vicissitudes of war and displacement, and Quick's painstaking research brilliantly illuminates their hitherto unrecorded plight. A perfect fit for her publishers, Virago. Carmen Callil, founder of the imprint, who first encouraged Diana to write, must be very proud indeed.
IN PARALLEL WITHthe historical research that anchors the narrative, she continues her own emotional quest to understand what on Earth it was that turned her grandfather Bertie into a "feared monster" rather than the "pal" her own father, Leonard, longed him to be. It's only when her mother, previously resistant to all her inquiries, finally deposits a blue chocolate box on her daughter's lap saying, with massive understatement, "you might find these helpful", that the most tender and revealing part of the story comes touchingly to life. For the box contained the treasure trove of her father's first correspondence with the woman who was to become his wife.
All Diana’s empathy as an actor comes into play here, as she tells the story of her parents’ courtship, tentatively at first, almost reluctant to admit that it brought her to tears. But of course it did. To suddenly be privy to the secrets of your own father’s psyche, his doubts and his fears, longings and frustrations, all marked horribly by his family’s resentment of his desire to break with the past and forge a new life of his own, is terribly precious, and in sharing it she gives the reader valuable insight into what it was like to be a penniless dental student alone in England in the 1930s, with little to recommend him as a potential suitor.
The vibrant young woman who was a small bit older and who hailed from a happy family, owned two hairdressing shops (not to mention a nippy sports car) and with whom he fell overwhelmingly in love comes to life through his letters, as indeed does his own sterling worth.
They met thanks to being cast in an am-dram production of The Pirates of Penzance– fitting, considering their future daughter's career and the fact that it was from the borders of Cornwall that her great-grandfather hailed before setting sail for India, from whence he would never return. This thoughtful work, a noble endeavour in so many ways, deserves from her audience a huge round of applause.
- A Tug on the Thread By Diana Quick Virago, 293pp. £17.99
Jeananne Crowley is an actor and writer