Virginia McKenna - The Life in My Years

First published in 2009 by Oberon Books Ltd
Electronic edition published in 2013

Oberon Books Ltd
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Text copyright Virginia McKenna 2009

The life that I have copyright the Estate of Leo Marks 1998

The poem Dolphin was first published in Into the Blue (The Aquarian Press, 1992); What is the Earth was first published in Save the Earth (Dorling Kindersley, 1991).

For other copyright information, see Photograph Credits, p 244.

Virginia McKenna is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. The author has asserted her moral rights.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be circulated without the publishers consent in any form of binding or cover, stored in a retrieval system or circulated electronically, other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on any subsequent purchaser.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

PB ISBN: 978-1-84002-898-0
E ISBN: 978-1-7831-9442-1

eBook conversion by Replika Press PVT Ltd, India.

I MUST HAVE BEEN ABOUT fourteen years old when I first knew the name of Virginia McKenna. She seemed to be almost unbearably beautiful, a famous film star, and as remote as the moon from our childhood world of boarding schools and mucking about on the farms in the holidays. My kind of acting was being in the school play and there seemed to be no possible link between being Aaron in Christopher Frys The Firstborn (I often played boys and men, and my chin was always covered with glued-on beards, my thighs often slapped with a deep merry laugh) and actually turning into another real person, with a camera inches from your face. She did it though, and in hauntingly memorable films too. I think she was the first actress I longed to be like, but apart from a rumour that her mother had bought a house I had once stayed in (No! So she might have walked about looking at the rooms! and seen where we slept! Gosh!!) there was no chance that our paths would ever cross. It was more likely that pigs might fly.

Why did I admire her so? Because she always inhabited the character she played completely, and never sounded ill-at-ease with her lines (its quite an art to make the words sound as though you are speaking them for the first time): and because she was serene, and because the people she had been chosen to portray were often heroines, and because she moved well and was heck, she was a star.

YEARS LATER, because the world is small and life is short, my career galloped me along to the position where I could be asked to appear in charity shows; and it was at one such, at the Garrick Theatre, when she and her daughter Louise were singing a duet (singing? how did I miss that she could sing like a bird as well?) that I approached her. I said that I was very sad to hear of the dreadful end of Pole Pole, the little elephant she and her husband Bill Travers had been filming with, and if there was anything I could do, I would.

She was slighter than I imagined, very small-boned and fragile to look at and exceptionally beautiful. (Louise was exquisite too: in the prompt corner of the theatre I heard the late Christopher Reeve say: Who is that girl? I have to know her.) Virginia turned to me and said We have just started something; Ill let you know. And she did, and it was Zoo Check.

This was long before it was usual for famous people to start charities or even really to support them; and it seemed so right and daring that these two giants of the screen should use the springboard of the film Born Free to bring the countrys attention to how dreadful zoos are. It wasnt easy; the customary arguments were raised (I suppose you care more for animals than children they are safe in zoos and must be happy because they are eating but not everyone can go to Africa to see an elephant), but with iron determination and impeccable manners the Travers husband and wife team (as they were now called) began to turn the tide of public opinion.

Above all, they made us think of what freedom really is, and how it is the most longed-for right in existence. When someone is punished we take away their freedom because, short of killing them, its the worst thing we can do to them. Watch any creature in confinement and it will take the chance to escape if it can. Bill once told me never to forget that every animal is unique and has its own character: each sad lion in a circus ring, each shabby bear in a fake rocky cage has just as many idiosyncrasies as our own beloved household pets: (Smokey wont eat unless I put the dish beside the cooker; Rover always remembers Aunt Mary and growls when she gets out of the car).

BILL AND VIRGINIA: Virginia and Bill. Its not surprising she starts and ends the book with Bill; they were as close as Baucis and Philemon whom the gods made into twin trees when they died. Her achievement as an actress is one thing, her continuation of the work she and Bill started is quite another. The pages are full of yearning and remembrances, not bitter, but infinitely poignant to those of us who knew them both (well, we all did, you and I; they were our people on the screen, our stars and heroes).

She has made a sort of scrapbook of her life in this book, flitting forwards and backwards, rich in details of filming, of family, friends and animals, and of her great passion for nature. I like to think it is as though we are sitting in a grand hotel room, or, far better, a shady garden Yes! as though I am interviewing her, and meeting her for the very first time! Sometimes we stop for a cup of tea, sometimes I ask her to elaborate on something, sometimes we sit in quietness or hear her speak her poetry. (Oh, didnt I say that? She is a poet as well as everything else.) What we have here is Virginia McKenna as she sees herself; her life, full of passion and grace and fun and wisdom and friendship, is the main feature tonight, so settle back as the lights dim and watch her as she appears as herself in her greatest role of all.

W HEN I WAS THINKING about writing a memoir in 2006, I turned to an old friend, Adrian House, whom I first met in the 1960s. Adrian, who was then an editor at Collins and is now a much admired author, looked at the first few pages and encouraged me to continue. He provided excellent guidelines. Im not sure I have followed them successfully! Memory has its own way of leading you on, but what is certain is that it took me to the end of 2008! It is only in that sense that it is chronological. The book itself is a random glimpse into the experiences I have had, the people and animals I have known. Yet everything is connected in some way.

It has been a strange book to undertake, quite different from those I have written in the past: Into the Blue; Some of my Friends Have Tails; On Playing with Lions (with my husband, Bill); Beyond the Bars, to which I was a contributor. In this book I have been on a personal journey. Sometimes surprising myself by what I remember, sometimes ashamed at what I have forgotten; always interested in what is to come. Perhaps at the heart of it is my regret that nowhere can I read about my parents and grandparents. My daughter, Louise, often wants to talk about family stories and I can only tell her the ones from my personal experience.