Chapter 18

"Hayley"

excerpt from What Shall We Do Tomorrow? (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1969)

an autobiography by Mary Hayley Bell, Hayley's mother

(playwright, actress, wife of actor Sir John Mills)

In February 1945 Jack Hylton agreed to do Duet For Two Hands. And Pelissier was to direct it, Elspeth was to play Herda Sarclet, Mary Morris was Abigail, Elwyn Brook Jones was Edward Sarclet, and Johnnie (Note: Mary's husband John Mills) played Cass, the part I had written for him. We opened in Blackpool, and the play was so well received that in a fit of exhilaration Ant threw his hat in the sea.

On the night that the play opened at the Lyric Theater, we celebrated by staying at the Savoy, in a suite looking out across the Thames, and there, the following morning, we learned that the 'house' had been sold out for three weeks.

Just before we left for the theatre, Johnnie put his arm round me and led me to the window. 'Look out there and remember this moment,' he said. 'It doesn't happen every time.'

'Take care of yourself, won't you?' I said. 'There are so many lovely things to do together, we're so lucky, that sometimes I feel a little afraid.'

*

On 7 May the war with Germany was over. We kept saying it to each other, over and over again, but somehow we couldn't believe it. Then three months later Japan surrendered. 'The war is over, Bunchie,' (Note: nickname for Mary's daughter Juliet) I said, as I tucked her up in bed.

'What's that mean?' she asked.

'It means we're safe,' I replied. 'There's nothing to be afraid of anymore.'

That same month I found that I was going to have another baby. It was to arrive the following April, and I knew it was to be called Hayley. It will be a son, I told myself, with the red hair of the Bells and Recompense Sherrill. He would be a reincarnation of my father, the wheel that would come full circle, as he had once said.

With the thought of Hayley arriving, we knew that Misbourne Cottage was too small. Rex and Lili Harrison were moving out of their house adjoining the golf course at Denham, so we bought it. The Little House was not my kind of house at all, for it was a white stucco, modern edifice, and though the rooms were big and the atmosphere cheerful, there was no age in it. There were a few flower beds and small shavers of cherry trees, but no maturity of any kind, either in the house or the garden. It was our sixth move! It seemed somehow that I was following the pattern of my childhood as the itinerant traveler, the Hadji; but I was no longer the Outcast Child, for there was Johnnie, who was quite happy to be anywhere, so long as we were all together, for he has always been a man whose home is literally where he hangs his hat or kicks off his shoes.

For me it was different. I always had my head on one side with sadness at the end of anything, for so often it had been the end of everything. At the back of my mind I suppose that I was always searching for Polesden Lacey, for a mature garden of cobwebbed antiquity, with old gnarled trunks of wisteria, and mellowed walls where hollyhocks and sunflowers could lean for rest in a hot, sunny English summer, and where one could catch the sudden aromatic scent of Bom Jesus from herbs growing out of the cracks of flags on an old terrace.

I was convinced that Hayley would be a boy. He was to be born almost if not exactly on the day that my father died. He would be a boy with red hair, and his life would surely be as successful as my father had hoped his would be.

On 17 April I retired to 27 Welbeck Street to await my son's arrival.

'This,' said Roy Saunders, my gynaecologist, 'is Dr Lewis. He's going to give you the "minutes".'

He was a small, round man with a smooth face and white hair, and he smiled sympathetically, perhaps because he saw the trembling pulse in my throat. I remember thinking vaguely that he reminded me of a Confucian monk. He arranged his assorted apparatus. I thought suddenly of the child within me, moving towards the start of life...a boy, my boy! I set my teeth and grinned at Dr Lewis.

'Have you any children?' I asked him, to get on terms.

'No,' he said.

Across the room Roy had taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. Dimly I was aware of this strange committee that awaited my baby in their shirtsleeves, so different from Bunch's arrival in the middle of the Blitz. Then the pain had me by the bowels again, and I groaned aloud. Dr Lewis put out the mask and held it over my face.

I had the most curious dream.

I was standing in the doorway of an enormous building. Dr Lewis sat at the entrance, and nodded to me as I went in. The vast room was full of very small children, standing in a row as if they were at an identification parade. I found myself walking towards them, and in my mind ran an idiotic jingle: 'It isn't you, it isn't you... it's you.'

I stared at the children and they stared solemnly back. I looked down the long line, and hesitated. I thought for a moment that a small girl had lifted her hand towards me, but I paid no attention to her, so intent I was upon finding him. Then I saw him standing a little apart; there was no question that he was the one I was looking for, for he had red hair and was straight and slim. I pointed my finger.

'That's him!' I cried. 'That's the one!' and I looked over my shoulder to where Dr Lewis was sitting.

'Outside,' he said without looking up.

I found myself on the side of a hill looking down at a great rushing river. Roy was standing with his feet athwart it, helping a long line of children across the water.

'Coo-ee!' I called. 'I can see you!'

He looked up and laughed loudly.

'It's all a figment of your imagination,' he called...

I found myself back in bed looking up into Dr Lewis's face. He was grinning. 'Show her, Roy,' he said.

Roy held a small baby in his two hands. For a second it looked exactly like the Bunch, but there was no sign of red hair.

'That's not the one I chose,' I said indignantly. Both men laughed, and as I looked down at the small morsel of humanity in Roy's two hands, I thought I saw a trickle of tears down the alabaster face.

'What is it?' I asked.

'A girl,' he said. 'A most beautiful little girl.'

'But it's crying!' I said.

'I don't think so, not really. It would be most unusual for a baby a few moments old to be crying! The tear ducts aren't working yet.'

I lay back on the pillows and watched Roy at the basin. He had his back to me and I started telling him of my dream, but I had got no farther than the fact that I had called to him, when he turned from the basin and looked at me with a smile.

'It's all a figment of your imagination,' he said.

Hayley - 7 pounds 9 ounces, with a mouth like a cabbage rose. Johnnie loved her. From the start she held out her small, weaving hands to his face, and I was reminded again of my dream, of that little girl who had lifted her hand towards me. She never cried, she smiled considerably earlier than most babies, and her fat little hands were always held out to the sun.

She was called Hayley - she had to be - and she was also called Catherine after Johnnie's mother. She was called Rose, because to me it meant England, and she was called Vivien, because of my beautiful friend. Elspeth and Lili Palmer were her godmothers, Charles B. Cochran and John Drummond her godfathers.

Two weeks later we took her back to the Little House. It was one of those cloudless May days when England is at her best and most beautiful. The house was full of flowers and smiling faces, and Bunch, now a little girl of four with brown bare legs and flying white hair, was standing by the gate waiting.

I lay back against the pillows, with sensuous pleasure as a little warm wind fanned my face through the open window. I could see Bunch playing in the garden among the daffodils - their petals touching her cheeks; she looked exactly like them only a little bigger, a daffodil of a child, slim and bending, her long hair brushing the blossoms.

'Coo-ee!' I whistled. She turned, looked up, and started running towards the house. A moment later, she was standing beside me. I noticed she had on her yellow dress. 'When I was a little girl, I had a yellow dress,' I said. "It had big pockets and that's where Nosey Parker (Note: a pet rat which Mary kept as a child in her native China) used to sit.'

'Can I have something to put in my big pockets?' she asked eagerly. 'Something of my own to love?'

'What would you like?' I watched her animated face.

'A kitten, like Vivien has, with the same colour eyes.'

She looked at the sleeping baby, and then tiptoed across the room.

'We're more lucky than God, aren't we?' she asked.

'Why?'

'Because God hasn't got a sister.'

'No.'

'And he hasn't got a brother neither.'

'No.'

'When will Hayley and me get a brother?'

'One day, when he's ready to come,' I told her.

'I think you have the most beautiful feet in the world,' she said abruptly. 'If I saw your feet sticking up out of the long grass, I'd think they was flowers and I'd pick them and put them in a vase in my nursery.'

And she ran out into the garden.

So the whirligig of time rolled round. Smokey the Siamese cat arrived, and was duly carried about in the pockets of Bunch's yellow dress, just as Nosey Parker had been all those years ago! And the garden seemed always to be full of children crawling under the currant bushes or lying full length in the tickly, sun-warmed long grass.

*

In February 1947 we bought Fernacres, a small manor house near Fulmer, built in about 1800. We first saw it on Johnnie's birthday, the 22nd. The snow lay thickly everywhere, but the sun shone brightly across the sparkling lawns. A little grey house covered with wisteria, nestling between lawns and meadows full of old oaks, and beyond them a small lake covered with ice and surrounded by rhododendrons, we fell in love with it instantly, and bought it. To Johnnie I know that Fernacres was of all our homes, his most beloved. He would happily have never wanted to move again, and though I loved it, particularly in the spring when the wisteria wrapped the house in a lavender cloak, it was still not Polesden Lacey; there was no walled garden, though there were greenhouses and stables and a splendid asparagus bed.

At Fernacres I started writing Angel -a play based on the Constance Kent murder in 1860. Binkie Beaumont said he would produce it, and Johnnie was to direct. On the day of the dress rehearsal, our Nanny gave in her notice; she wanted to become an air stewardess and had to catch the nine o'clock train! It was a nerve-racking morning, for Hayley, sitting thoughtfully upon her pot, wasn't in a co-operative mood.

'Do hurry up, Hayley! I urged.

'Can't! was all she would say, so we were not only late for rehearsal at the Strand Theatre, but we had to take the two girls with us. Bunch was happy enough playing about among the seats in the theatre and talking to herself, sometimes a little too loudly, but Hayley was a different matter. Too young to be interested for long, or able to sit still, I had to put her in charge of one of the lady character actresses in the cast, but during the morning I realized that the lady in question was now on the stage in a scene. I ran round to her dressing-room to collect Hayley, but there was no sign of her. No one had seen her! I asked the stage doorkeeper if he had seen what might have appeared to be a small dwarf, but he shook his head. She seemed to have disappeared and I was distraught with worry and fear. It was nearly an hour before she was discovered. She had walked straight out of the stage door and up the road to the next theatre, the Aldwych. Here she was found sitting on the lap of the stage doorkeeper, chatting away and having sardines levelled into her mouth on the end of a knife! No one, least of all Hayley, seemed in the least concerned.

*

After Great Expectations, Johnnie started Scott of the Antarctic for Michael Balcon at Ealing. There was, from the beginning, a haunting likeness between Johnnie and Robert Falcon Scott, so much so that when we first met Peter Scott and Cherry Garrard, they were astounded. Cherry Garrard had never fully recovered from Scott's death. He told me that when Scott was eventually found eight months later by the relief party, his body was seen for one moment to be sitting up facing the opening of the tent. His coat had been pulled aside at the neck, and his blue eyes were wide open; on his cheeks were two frozen tears. Johnnie was tremendously affected by Scott. He read everything he could about him as well as many of his personal letters. He would spend hours staring at the photographs of Scott and the various polar expeditions which the studio sent him. He became remote and thoughtful. He told me that he felt he had come to know Scott intimately, and that sometimes he felt a close contact to him. 'Look, he even walks like him,' Cherry Garrard told me.

I followed Johnnie to Norway, from Oslo by train through the red and gold valleys to the snowfields of Finse. I had re-read South With Scott, as I had written some of the dialogue for the film, and although undoubtedly the clothing helped a great deal, it was curious how closely the actors playing the parts resembled the original people. Surely, Bowers himself was never better represented than by Reginald Beckwith, or Oates than by Derek Bond, Wilson by Harold Warrender or the stalwart Evans by James Robertson Justice.

Scott of the Antarctic was a great film. It could have been even greater, had Johnnie and the director been permitted to show Scott more as an ordinary human being, with the human frailties which he must have had. This unreal balance Johnnie found difficult in his portrayal. Even so, he was more affected by the making of Scott of the Antarctic than any other film in which he has appeared.

End of Chapter 18

There is a lot more mention of Hayley Mills' early years in What Shall We Do Tomorrow?.

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