piping decorating my school bag has caught me on the temple. My elbows and knees are indented and stained with the patterns and juices of the grass, and the collar of my blouse is torn where Pauline grabbed me by the tie. I feel important and scared.
There are consequences to our fight. Pauline has a chip in her front tooth, caused by my wild kick. And Mum, appalled by the state of my clothes when I stagger home, keeps me off school until I am swapped into another class. There is another consequence, of course, less obvious. Pauline Bright and I are connected. We are certainly not friends, but we are on our way to something. And Pauline Bright is trouble.
Call sheet: ‘That Summer’
June 17th 1975.
Director: Michael Keys
DOP: Anthony Williams, BSC.
First AD: Derek Powell.
6.30 a.m. call.
CAST: Dirk Bogarde [COLIN], Lallie Paluza
[JUNE], Douglas Alton [MAN IN CAR], Vera Wyngate
[WOMAN IN CAR].
LOCATION: Hexthorpe Flats, Doncaster.
34. EXT. SCRUBLAND. DAY.
COLIN and JUNE fish in the pond. JUNE catches a fish, gets wet.
35. EXT. SCRUBLAND. DAY.
JUNE talks to a WOMAN passing by, who is suspicious. COLIN reassures her.
36. EXT. SCRUBLAND. DAY.
JUNE kisses COLIN goodbye.
VERA ALWAYS HAD a bacon sandwich on location. She knew she shouldn’t, but the smell was irresistible, and there was bugger all else to do once you’d been in make-up, and getting up so early – five o’clock to be ready for the car that picked you up from the hotel – gave you an appetite. Anyway, she was resigned to doing character parts at her age, so an extra pound here or there didn’t much matter. If anything, it was all to the good. She wished, though, that the costume was a little more forgiving. The view of herself in the mirror of the make-up van was a depressing one, even allowing for the early call and the make-up girl’s intention of making her look as dowdy and nondescript as her few lines required. It didn’t help that the little girl, Lallie, was sitting in the chair next to her, eyes clear and brilliant, skin vividly freckled and unexhausted. She was a funny-looking kid really; not what you could call pretty, but if youth came in a bottle it’d sell out in five minutes. While a make-up girl methodically powdered her, Lallie kept breaking into a Jimmy Cagney impression. Vera was far from charmed by this. She doubted the child had ever seen Jimmy Cagney; what she was doing was an impression of an impression. It was all too early, anyway, for any kind of performance.
‘Do Dirk,’ she heard the make-up girl, Julie, urge, silencing the cries of ‘you dirty rat’.
‘Oh I couldn’t possibly,’ said the little girl, and then Vera really was amazed, because the child’s face captured perfectly the saucer-eyed, self-conscious melancholy of their leading man, along with the light regret of his voice. The make-up girls laughed.
‘Michael, dear boy, would it be possible to have a word?’ the child continued, and segued into the director, Mike, whose patrician drawl would be easy enough for anyone to take off, although not everyone would note so accurately the barest hint of a stammer in his intonation, the way he headed off certain words before they could be formed into anything troublesome.
‘She’s like a little parrot, in’t she?’ said Julie, blotting Vera’s mouth with a tissue.
‘Ar, Jim lad,’ Lallie cawed. It was all too much, that degree of attention. Bound to ruin any child. Vera felt suddenly uneasy about talking to the make-up girl, in case Lallie was gathering material to ‘do’ her later.
‘Is that me finished, darling?’ she asked, and heard herself, camply over-theatrical. Once Julie had frowned and re-pencilled an eyebrow, Vera was glad to pluck off the tissues guarding her neck and go outside to the catering van for her bacon sandwich.
She’d had better – the watery bacon made the bread go limp, even through the butter. Which wasn’t butter, of course, but sulphurously yellow marge. Still. Nice, with a strong cup of tea, and a ciggie. It was only the second day of location filming, and Vera’s first. Close to her last as well, bar her opening of a door to field a question from a policeman later in the week. Oh well, it was a job.
There was no sign of Dirk, sequestered in a modest caravan, or of Mike, possibly sequestered with him, going over that day’s scenes. Vera could see the director of photography, Tony, already setting up his first shot by the pond, where