Serendipity
serendipity /ser-uhn-dip-i-tee/ n. an aptitude or faculty for making desirable discoveries by accident.
Serendipity, indeed. The word has been brought to my attention so many times that I’ve started to take note. The serendipity in question connects me to a rather large, bald man with massive moustaches called Arthur Ransome.
Sometimes extraordinary things do happen to ordinary people. Little girls can find themselves becoming film stars. Long ago, and quite unexpectedly, I found myself appearing in the EMI feature film of Arthur Ransome’s book Swallows and Amazons, made for a universal international audience. I played Able-seaman Titty, one of the four Swallows. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I became Titty for a while, wearing thin cotton dresses and elasticated navy-blue gym knickers, which the camera crew soon referred to as ‘passion killers’. The book was written in 1929 and although the film adaptation was made in the early 1970s it has an ageless quality and has been repeated on television year after year, typically on a Bank Holiday between movies starring either Rock Hudson or Doris Day..
I came by the part of Titty because I could play the piano. Although I had no ambition to be an actress, at the age of ten I was cast in a BBC dramatisation of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie. I played a little girl from the valley of Slad called Eileen Brown. Laurie Lee told us she was the first person he’d ever fallen in love with. He knew my parents and was around during the filming since he had a cottage nearby. I’d been to a village school in the Cotswolds myself and enjoyed being in the classroom scenes, despite having to wear a drab and rather itchy green dress. I was too shy to put myself forward when the director, Claude Whatham, asked if anyone knew the chants to playground skipping games, but I coped with having to fall in love. It only involved smiling broadly. The difficult bit was that I had to accompany the eleven-year-old Laurie Lee on the piano while he played a violin in the village concert. I plodded through Oh, Danny Boy at an agonising pace.
‘Do you think you could play a little faster?’ the director asked.
‘No,’ I said, flatly. ‘These are crotchets, they don’t go any faster.’
Claude Whatham must have remembered my crotchets, for two years later, in March 1973, a letter appeared, addressed to my father. It arrived completely out of the blue, from a company called Theatre Projects:
We are at present casting for a film version of SWALLOWS AND AMAZONS which Mr Whatham is going to direct. We were wondering if you would be interested in your daughter being considered for one of the parts in this film.
Amazing!
To gain a part I had to be able to swim. I think this was to do with ensuring I would not drown. As it happened I could row, sail and swim quite well. My parents had taught me. I can’t remember Claude asking me about this when he interviewed me. He only wanted to know what my favourite television programme was.
‘Blue Peter!’
‘Why?’
‘Because they show you how to do things.’
It was exactly what Mr Whatham wanted to hear. Why? Because that is how Arthur Ransome wrote his books. He doesn’t tell. He shows his readers how to sail, how to camp, and how to fish. I had already read most of the twelve books in the series and loved the stories. What I didn’t know then was the effect they would have on the rest of my life.
I couldn’t envisage myself as Titty at all. The illustrations show her with dark hair, cut in a bob. Arthur Ransome had described her as ‘a little eager imaginative child of about nine’. I was now aged twelve, and thought myself far more like the practical Susan, Titty’s elder sister. However, I was soon persuaded that I could climb into the character and play the part of Titty. I took this assurance on board and did my best to behave like a nine-year-old with a vivid imagination. Thankfully they cut my straggly blonde hair, and I soon started singing out the dialogue that I already knew off by heart from reading the book: ‘I expect someone hid on the island hundreds and hundreds of years ago.’
While Arthur Ransome was obviously impervious to the cold, I was not. I shivered terribly in the sleeveless cotton dress I was given to wear as we sailed off to Wild Cat Island, but otherwise I enjoyed playing Titty and soon became her in every way. She was a child who took to telling stories and drawing maps, her mind entering that of an imperialist explorer of the early twentieth century.
‘Here we are, intrepid explorers, making the first ever way into uncharted waters. What mysteries will they hold for us? What dark secrets shall be revealed?’ Titty wondered, transforming the English Lake District into an exotic land inhabited by natives and savages, some of whom used bows and arrows, while on a houseboat in a desolate bay lived Captain Flint with his green parrot. A parrot that she wanted very much indeed.
The letter from Theatre Projects came while my father was away on business in South Africa. Mum never, ever opened his mail, but made an exception this time. Had she not done so, I would have missed the opportunity to be considered for the part. She replied on his behalf, and Dad took us all into London the morning he stepped off the plane.
Chapter One
Preparations for Filming
By May 1973 I was on my way up to the North West of England to take a leading part in the feature film of Swallows and Amazons that the producer, Richard Pilbrow of Theatre Projects, had somehow persuaded Nat Cohen of EMI to finance. I had no idea of the responsibility being laid on my shoulders, or of the huge sums of money involved. I was just doing it for fun.
My lack of concern emanates from the pages of the diary that I kept. I have three volumes, in readable italic hand-writing, detailing what we did, and indeed what we said, on every single day. The wording is childlike but, as a little bit of film history, the diary provides the facts from an interesting angle. My mother was pleased when I started to type them up forty years later. She’d been nagging me for years.
On the inside cover of the first volume, I wrote:
I had been very lucky to be picked out of all those hundreds of children for one of the six who were cast. I had been in a film with Claude, the director, before but only for three days. He short-listed me for the part of Titty. I was then chosen with 22 others for a sailing holiday [a cold weekend in March at Burnham-on-Crouch] to see how we reacted and sailed.
This weekend had proved something of an endurance test. It was miles from where we lived. The weather was awful, with driving rain falling on rough seas. The only warm piece of clothing I took was a knitted hat. We slept in cabins aboard a permanently moored Scout boat with flowery orange curtains. There were no parents around to boost our morale, the sailing was challenging, and I felt bitterly cold the entire time.
Richard Pilbrow brought his two children, Abigail and Fred. With him was Claude Whatham, Neville Thompson (the associate producer), and David Blagden who, as Claude was no sailor, was to be the film’s sailing director. He told us that he had read Swallows and Amazons forty-two times, which sounded daunting.
Out of an initial 1,800 who applied, twenty-two children had been short-listed and were effectively auditioning for the six parts. I still meet people who went up for them. We didn’t read from a script, we weren’t asked to improvise or act out a scene and there was no film test, but 8mm movie footage was taken. I wonder if it still exists. (NP?)
While there were only two or three boys up for the role of Roger, there were five girls auditioning to play Titty. At one stage Claude had a chat with the five of us in our cabin, all the Tittys. The others were so sweet that I didn’t think I stood a chance. I was undeniably gangly and felt that I kept saying the wrong thing. (NP?)
One of the other girls looked incredibly together. She had pretty, fashionable clothes and would make a point of brushing her hair and wearing jewellery, just as Mummy would have liked me to have done. While I was used to boats my sailing wasn’t up to much. I was completely in awe of the seamanship of Kit Seymour (who would land the part of Nancy) and how fast she got the dinghies to whizz through the driving rain.
We were all lucky to be the right age at the right time. I was perhaps the most fortunate because at twelve-and-a-half I was really too tall for the part of Titty. I was a year older and a good two inches taller than Simon West, who played Titty’s older brother, John, but Claude must have known that he could cheat this on-screen.
For more, please see: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sophie-Neville/e/B005DEVKQQ/
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