Believe Nothing Until it is Officially Denied by Patrick Cockburn

Author:Patrick Cockburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2024-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Bizarrely, Peggy, though obviously blameless for whatever Jean had done, was expelled with her.

At first Jean stuck to her story, perhaps fearing that if she admitted that she was not pregnant she might be sent back to Leatherhead Court. After her aunt Janet, a conventional lady who lived at Porlock in Devon, had picked up the two girls, she asked: ‘Jean are you then in the state of the Virgin Mary?’ Jean again said, ‘Yes.’ Only when they reached Janet’s cottage in Porlock did she admit ‘quietly, but unrepentantly’, that it was all untrue, and that the idea of spending another year in Leatherhead ‘was so horrendous to her that she had decided to go to any lengths to avoid it’.6

Jean’s expulsion from school was in keeping with her taste for melodrama and yearning for independence. Billee says that Jean made friends easily at school, but that ‘she loathed being institutionalised, loathed what she felt was the atmosphere of self-righteousness of the staff and the insensitive greed and self-satisfaction of England’s upper class’. Returning to Alexandria, which she loved, she swam, played tennis and went to endless parties, though Billee says she never forgave her father for sending her to Leatherhead Court, ‘away from the people and places she knew and loved’.

In the spring of 1928, she was sent to a finishing school in Neufchatel in Switzerland to perfect her French, learn German and go skiing. But she wanted, above all else, to be an actress and went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London for a year. She thought the teaching poor in quality, but she won a prize for acting in a French play, entitling her to choose her part in an upcoming production. She chose Phedre, Jean Racine’s tragedy about an ageing queen who develops a passion for her stepson Hippolytus. But one of her teachers objected that Jean was too immature to play the role, saying: ‘You are only seventeen and have no experience of life.’7 She was, in any case, the teacher continued, ‘destined to be a comedienne’.8 Angered by this criticism, Jean left RADA and started looking for work in the theatre and cinema.

She got a small part in a film comedy called Why Sailors Leave Home, in which a Cockney is put in charge of a sheikh’s harem. Jean played the part of a slave girl, at one point saying something in Arabic for added authenticity, though nobody else in the film company or among English audiences understood what she said. Only when the film reached Egypt and was shown in a cinema in Alexandria did Egyptian servants working at Maison Ballassiano, who had gone to see it, report back to her shocked parents the risqué words.9

Jean’s meagre earnings from acting and modelling were supplemented by an allowance from her father and from a trust fund left by her recently deceased maternal grandfather, Charles Caudwell. The money was just enough for Jean to live independently in London, though she found that jobs were scarce.

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