A Gull on the Roof by Derek Tangye

Author:Derek Tangye
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472110237
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

8

We had planted the violet runners in June – six thousand Governor Herrick in the top half of the field, the cemetery field where we had cropped potatoes; and two thousand Princess of Wales in the meadow walled by elms near the cottage which we whimsically called ‘Gee’s Meadow’ at the request of Gertrude Lawrence. ‘It would give me a nice warm feeling,’ she wrote to us from New York, ‘if I knew there was a corner of England which was for ever me.’ Sentimental, loyal, enchanting, provocative Gertie – what compelling force made me go into that meadow one August evening and be quietly standing there when Jeannie came running, calling: ‘Gee’s dead! . . . a cable from Richard . . .!

Death can bring anger as well as grief. The old die creeping gently into our sorrow but those with uncompleted lives, promise unfulfilled, gifts unspent, savage the placid sweetness of our memories, thrusting frustrated yearnings into our hands, bruising the tears with cries of what might have been. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the sun!’ said Dylan Thomas.

Gertie’s life – or Gee or Gertrude – although she herself preferred Gee, belonged to the age when talent of the arts was leisurely matured so that the future was always more enrichening than the past. Time hovered instead of rushing, yielding the opportunity to delve into the secret self, extracting from its recesses the uncorrupted truth. Temptation was not always at the elbow to offer the illusion that sudden fame was permanent success, because the arbiters of achievement – the Charlots and the Cochrans – were governed by standards that did not admit false values. Thus Gertie, steered in her youth by their guidance, was able to find as she grew older the gifts deep within her which earned the homage that dipped the lights of Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue on the August evening that she died.

Gertie had an irrepressible ebullience which enabled the sleek or the humble to rejoice in her company – an audience of ‘Private Lives’ or that of troops in a concert hall. She had no conceit and beneath the gloss was a perennial wonderment that the little girl who once danced to the barrel organ outside Kensington Oval had become a star in two continents. She preferred to remember her childhood rather than to forget it, and this was the strength of her sympathy for those who were struggling. Danny Kaye made his debut on Broadway in ‘Lady in the Dark’ of which Gertie was the star, and on the first night he brought down the house with a song he sang just before her own big number. Danny, instead of being delighted, was terrified. How would Gertie react? He could not believe that she would be pleased – but of course she was and insisted that he be promoted to star billing. A few years later Danny came to London to repeat his first big triumph at the Palladium, and at the same time Gertie had a great success in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘September Tide’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.