Sometimes the handwriting in my juvenile diaries is hard to decipher.
Other times, the scrawl is legible but the text is hard to interpret. The entry for 25 January 1974 is such an instance, rereading it 50 years later.
P.E. good + drama good. trial me a witness Downing made a mess of it.
Let us not fret about my pre-teen punctuation and sentence structure…or lack thereof.
My main concern here is with the reference to Downing.
There was no-one named Downing in 1S.
I asked a few 1S pals to hive mind this problem. Who was Downing and what on earth might Downing have done to “make a mess of it”?
Dave French suggested:
I remember that Drama class well, it was in the afternoon. Mistakenly, the dinner ladies served up magic mushrooms with lunch that day. That probably explains it – Downing was just ‘in your head’. It was quite embarrassing really; I still have nightmares.
Rohan Candappa offered an alternative theory:
Actually I remember the boy ‘Downing’. Downing was his nickname. It was a Cockney rhyming slang thing: Downing Street – Warwick Frearson.
To be honest, I think none of us really knew how rhyming slang worked.
Hmmm. The half-century-old 1S hive appears to be a bit of a struggling colony these days, especially in the matter of remembering the finer details of class activities. I can’t imagine any of the above evidence holding up in a jury trial.
I decided instead to seek help from the internet. I put the name “Downing” into the Alleyn’s 1970 Facebook Group search and found “Mike Downing” in our group, stitched up (or should I say “introduced”) by Steve Williams some years ago.
A Google Search of “Mike Downing Alleyn’s” found the gentleman on LinkedIn, asserting that he spent 1972-1979 at Alleyn’s (a year above us) and again a visible connection with Steve Williams.
There was nothing else for it. I contacted Steve Williams. Steve confirmed that Mike Downing was indeed a year above my 1S year, two years above Steve. Steve also confirmed that Mike was and still is a top bloke, who would no doubt enjoy the fifteen minutes of fame (or infamy) and rise to the challenge of trying to recall what might have happened.
Frankly, I can only imagine a few possibilities for this mystery diary entry.
The most plausible in my mind is that Mike Downing inadvertently entered our classroom half way through a double lesson. Opening the wrong classroom door by mistake during another class’s lesson was not an uncommon occurrence at Alleyn’s.
But in order to make it into my diary – a very rare mention of a specific event – the interruption was, presumably, during a key dramatic moment while I was giving evidence. I imagine myself fully in character. Lost within my back story and the highly-charged dramatic circumstances in which my character found himself. Such an interruption would, in those circumstances, have utterly demolished the fourth wall. My potentially monumental acting career thus cruelly interrupted, never again to find the giddy artistic heights that were just that moment about to blossom. A mess of it indeed.
The other possible answer to the Downing mystery is that Downing was part of that drama class and somehow muffed his lines. Perhaps he got tongue-tied or incriminated himself or failed to cross-examine me well enough to expose the implausibility of my evidence.
Is it possible that we occasionally (or even regularly) combined forces with a second year class on drama Friday? Or might Downing have been attending remedial first year drama classes, having made a mess of drama when he was a first year…only to go and make a mess of it again as a remedial member of our class?
I put it to you, dear readers (aka members of the jury) that we need to call at least two additional witnesses to the infamous “made a mess of it” event. Mr Ian Sandbrook (Sir) and Mr Mike Downing. Unless someone else who was there on that fateful day has memories to share.
Postscript One: Mike Downing Writes:
I seem to recall that I was in the end of year production of Dr and the Devils by Dylan Thomas for which I received critical acclaim in the school magazine
but that may have been 1973. A later foray into Drama spanning some 40 years revealed that I was always late to put my book down and could paraphrase with the best of them when the lines were not forthcoming! I was also in the G & S society production of Trial by Jury so maybe that makes sense and I may well have messed up but old age has reduced it all to a vague blur! Shame you didn’t get to critique some of my later efforts as I definitely got quite good at the whole drama thing in the end
. Came close to going professional at one stage but rather preferred the security of a regular pay cheque. Does that jog your memory at all? I doubt it refers to my older brother 1968-75 who never went near a stage in his life.
Postscript Two: Ian Sandbrook (“Sir”) Responds:
IAN SANDBOOK: I am very sorry, but I have absolutely no recall of Downing’s intervention in the drama class of Jan 25th 1974…
IAN HARRIS: Don’t worry about your lack of memory. It’s my diary and I cannot remember this stuff, so I cannot realistically expect others to remember it for me.