Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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‘Hurray! Congratulations! I haven’t seen it in the papers yet. We haven’t had The Times, only the Daily Telegraph, and I can’t find it in there. Anyway practically all the school knows and it was the topic of conversation wherever I went.’
In June 1945 she passed her basic school certificate – the equivalent of current GCSEs. Like her sisters before her, she stayed on at Dr Williams’ to study for her higher certificate – A levels – but her patience with constantly trailing in the wake of Ann and Gwyneth had reached breaking point. Like many younger children – particularly when their older siblings are of the same sex – she had long felt eclipsed. At Dr Williams’ was born her lifelong determination to chart her own course – if possible in the opposite direction to that chosen by Ann and Gwyneth. This meant that some of her natural abilities – in academic work, for instance – were cast aside, or at least marginalised, since they were shared strengths with her sisters, in favour of talents that she considered unique to her, notably her delight in performing.
Having passed her school certificate, she found herself at what, with hindsight, can be seen as a crossroads in her life, for much of what she did subsequently flowed naturally from her decision to reject the path already well-trodden by her sisters and enthusiastically advocated by her parents. ‘I think,’ she recalls, ‘they had in mind that I would go to Oxford and become a teacher. My father told me I would make a good headmistress.’
By 1947, however, she had set her heart firmly and finally against going up to Oxford. The additional term it would entail to prepare for the Oxbridge examination was not the real problem. She stayed on after her highers anyway because she was still a year younger than most of her class. In that extra year she was appointed head girl. It was meant to be for a whole year and, having said no to Oxbridge, she set about learning French and Latin but she became increasingly unhappy as her relationship with Miss Lickes broke down. The head-teacher, who had succeeded Miss Orford in September 1945, was obsessed with stamping out overly intimate friendships between girls and ordered Bronwen to devise a quasi-military campaign to achieve this end. Her head girl realised that it was a pointless exercise, doomed to failure, and that many of these illicit passions were in any case quite harmless. It was taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut.
Headteacher and head girl clashed again when Miss Lickes insisted that Bronwen sleep in the main school. All previous head girls had been allowed to sleep in the separate and more relaxed house on the hillside above Dr Williams’ with their fellow sixth formers and younger members of staff. Bronwen was outraged and lonely. After just two terms, she left.
‘If I don’t get Higher,’ she had written in January 1946, ‘and I don’t honestly see how I possibly can, with two languages at which I’m no good, I don’t think it’s much use going to Oxford because even if I got in, I would most probably be sent down or something awful.’ There is an obvious lack of self-confidence – especially since she later passed all the exams she predicted she would fail – but her reasoning was more complex. ‘It was probably a mistake,’ she now acknowledges, and she often mentions her lack of formal academic qualifications. ‘But I was so fed up with always being compared with my sisters. Although I did in the end get my Latin matric and I could have got a place, I decided to go to drama school instead.’
Towards the end of her school career Bronwen came under the influence of Margaret Braund, a young drama teacher who had just qualified from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. ‘She was a very gawky schoolgirl,’ Braund remembers, ‘very tall, quite uncoordinated and really not very attractive. She used to stoop to try and compensate for being so tall, she had pigtails, wore glasses and had a slight cast in her eye.’
Bronwen had done a great deal of singing at school, and had played Little Buttercup in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, but she had never thought seriously about drama as a career. After a while Braund realised that there was something about this awkward adolescent girl and decided to give her a chance by casting her as the lead in a school production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. ‘The rest of the staff all said I was mad, that she would make a fool of herself, but slowly she became less inhibited, began to move more easily and – although I only realised this later when she became more religious – brought out the spiritual side of Joan very well.’ Saint Joan was Bronwen’s proudest moment at Dr Williams’. It made her consider drama as a career. ‘I think before I arrived,’ says Margaret Braund, ‘that she had nurtured some ambitions to be a singer. She had this rather romantic idea of being a great opera diva, but her voice had been strained in one of the school musicals and that had taken away her confidence. And then along came acting and her success in Saint Joan and it made such a difference to her that I suggested she apply to Central.’
To Alun Pugh his youngest daughter’s new-found delight in acting was of secondary importance. ‘He came to see me in Saint Joan and when I asked him afterwards what he had thought of it and my performance, he told me that he was prouder of the speech I’d made as head girl at prize day.’ Yet despite his disappointment, and after talking to Margaret Braund, he gave way and agreed to pay her fees at Central if she got a place. At least she would be living back in the family home at Hampstead, where he could keep a watchful eye on her potential student excesses; his career had now moved on with his appointment in 1947 to Marylebone County Court. Having brought up his daughters to be independent and strong-minded, it would have been inappropriate and out of character now to try and force Bronwen’s hand.
It was not that, at this stage, she had a burning ambition to tread the boards, or emulate the film stars she had glimpsed during her occasional trips to Dolgellau’s tiny cinema. She had no strong vision of a career or what she wanted to do with her life. Her strongest motivation was largely negative – to break the mould of the trinity of Pugh sisters by doing something entirely different. And perhaps those feelings of not being the longed-for son – overlaid by the strains of a wartime childhood – had made her, in a more positive way, determined to strike out on her own. Her parents, after all, had responded to growing up during the First World War with a similar resolution to overturn conventions.
She had no blueprint, just an unbending conviction that she wanted to be left to her own devices. Planning has never been one of her strengths. subsequently she has come to recognise, in the various life-changing decisions that she made as if on a whim, the influence of what might be called a guiding spirit or guardian angel. She may not have seen it at the time, but she is sure with hindsight that it was there.
Formal religion had played little role in her life at Dr Williams’. In July 1940, when the whole school caught a bad bout of flu, she was writing, ‘we are all in quarantine. Three cheers there is no church tomorrow.’ As she grew towards adulthood, she rejected the conventional practice of Christianity. Yet separate from, and indeed unconnected to, church-going and the God who presided over lifeless recitals of prayer and hymns, there were, she recalls, glimpses of a spiritual dimension, removed from routine attendance in the pews.
After her first brush with something ‘other’ at a seven-year-old’s birthday party, she continued in her school years occasionally to have experiences for which she could find no rational explanation. ‘As a teenager, I was having these extraordinary experiences of nature. I’d be on a walk with my school friends and quite suddenly there was no one there. It is like an explosion. And it left me with this wonderful feeling of being at one with everything. You’re not looking at the sunset, you’re part of it. Something clears in your mind and you understand something of the reality of nature.’ Had she then consulted the literature of Christian mysticism, she would have found parallel accounts of an overwhelming sense of oneness with the natural world and divined a clue as to what she herself in a small way was experiencing. Yet there was no one who could point her in the right direction and such exotic and generally Catholic spiritual raptures had no place in the conventionally Protestant and pointedly practical world of Dr Williams’. ‘I tried making a remark about it, wondering if the others I was with felt the same things, but no one said anything. Up to then I’d assumed everyone was the same. When I realised they weren’t, I felt very isolated.’
In July 1945 fifteen-year-old Bronwen Pugh went with a group of girl guides from Dr Williams’ to spend a week camping at Maidenhead next