Martin Edwards - A Voice Like Velvet

Mr Bisham had recently arrived at one of those stages any intellectual man can arrive at during middle life, if he is honest: which stage was to take a day off and have a serious look at himself. So he spent a rather windy March day looking at himself, and in the evening asked Mrs Bisham to have a look at him too. Unfortunately, the evening was interrupted by the arrival of Mr Bisham’s sister. Bess Bisham had the knack of interrupting things. She always brought a bit of an atmosphere with her and somehow or other induced a pause. Even before her brother had become the famous announcer, Bess had possessed a tremendous sort of family consciousness and now it seemed ideal for her to go about saying her brother was, ‘the BBC announcer, you know’. But she was a good sort, and she made a good friend if anyone took the trouble to be patient with her and not laugh at her war efforts.

Mrs Bisham went in for a good deal of sewing in wartime, and she strained her eyes and her pink lips at it, looking genial and concentrative at the same time, with three little lines over the bridge of her large nose. She had a beautiful petal-like skin, it was really the skin of a young girl. Yet she was on the hefty side, in an elegant kind of way. She was called Marjorie, with a j, not a g, and she spent her time saying she must not get snobbish, in spite of the rather snobbish district, and in spite of the determination of the public that announcers must become, and remain, the very hallmark of English respectability. This was all very fine, in its way, but the public might surely be entitled to like its announcers human, in addition? They were human beings, weren’t they? And she had quite a dread of Ernest becoming pompous and inhuman. He was already a borderline case. But both Marjorie and Bess knew that the Bisham family had ‘arrived’ when Ernest came home one night a year or two before and said, as he threw his hat on the hall table: ‘Thank God—they’re transferring me from the Overseas Service! I’m going to be at Broadcasting House! You’ll hear my name on the air!’ As a matter of fact, it was the day Rommel had used up all his best cards and the war, for us, seemed suddenly to have reached a happier turning point.

HIS new duties were more of a relief than an excitement to Ernest. It was a long time yet from the advent of the General Forces Programme and a long time before he was to say it was the So and So News and it was ‘read by Ernest Bisham’. He liked broadcasting, and he knew quite a lot about it; the public knew, or thought it knew, all about the wonderfully glamorous life of an actor: but if it had ever been an actor it would know something about such snags as being out of work, or of being in a three years’ run with matinees three times a week. But to Bess and Marjorie, who thought the radio full of glamour and romance—which it was, of course—it was as if Ernest had been made Lord Privy Seal. They joined hands and did an excited and rather ungainly sort of dance in the lounge, tilting over a small Chinese table with the silver cigarette-box on it, and only stopping because one of the servants happened to come in. You could not dance with BBC announcers in front of the servants, however closely connected. As the particular servant said (she was sacked for it later, when it came out): ‘Blimey, it’s like dancing with God!’ She was sacked because of the religious implications, quite apart from anything else that might be read into it. Bess advising Marjorie: ‘You owe it to Ernest to live very differently now, dear. And what about a bigger house?’

Ernest, however, had a particular affection for Tredgarth, The Ridgeway, Horsell, Woking. He often pleased Marjorie very much by saying he had never been happy anywhere else, and that Tredgarth, in spite of its frightful name, had brought him a happiness he had never known before.

‘And by that, of course, I mean you have brought it, Marjorie! For it was your house!’

Ernest paid compliments in rather a stately manner. He was a bit ponderous, rather as if he was reading it out to fifteen millions at six o’clock, or to twenty millions at nine o’clock. But although he said this and laughed, she usually blushed, for he was always sincere.

‘It’s nice of you to say so, Ernest.’

‘I mean it.’

‘I know you do.’

They had the habit of linking arms and wandering around the house or the garden. There were little stone toadstools, and carved garden imps called Rufus and Redbreast. A small, pale boy, in stone, called ‘Norman’ in gilt lettering, was standing beatifically under a fine tree with his hands extended as if measuring the air. There was a little garden shed for Shorter, the gardener, to have tea in. Being a BBC official, the question of alcohol, for Ernest Bisham, needed intensely delicate thought, yet it seemed reasonable to fill Tredgarth cellars as full as possible in case of weekend guests. They were not obliged to drink. There was always a pin of Best Bitter, and a thinning shelf of gin, whisky, brandy, port and sherry. The cigar department was so depleted that there remained only a box of a hundred Coronas from Throgmorton Street, and two boxes of fifty from Piccadilly. The garden was full of leeks and sprouts and celery dug into trenches, though in another part there were delphiniums, forget-me-nots, fuchsia and dahlias. Marjorie and Ernest were both rather vague about gardens and staff arrangements, leaving most of it to Bess, who more or less lived there with them. Bess disappeared at long intervals, but always turned up, usually in the morning after a tinny toll call which asked: ‘I’m in Folkestone, is the bath water hot? I heard you at eight, Ernest, you sounded rather hoarse.’ Within two hours she would arrive in very large boots and a tin helmet and, ‘Oh, a hundred Churchman Number One, for Ernest, canteen prices—or are you saving your voice?’

Generally speaking, it was calmer when Bess was away, for the servants didn’t worry about anything, least of all work, and when she came back, they did, and it was never long before one of them was being threatened with the sack, Marjorie privately protesting: ‘Please, Bess, don’t offend them, we only get servants at all because Ernest happens to be Ernest Bisham, the announcer. And even under these circumstances the servant problem is becoming increasingly difficult.’ But Bess said that no young person ought to take a servant’s job in these days unless they were pregnant. She saw women down coal mines, even, and applauded the Russian women fighting at the front. ‘Why don’t you look for an elderly couple? That’s all you need for this place.’

At dinner, Bess often looked quite feminine, especially after her masculine and muddy arrival as an ATS sergeant. Her grey hair was a bit short, but that was regulations; she was fond of saying that her hair had at one time reached down to an unmentionable part of her back, but even now she went in for oddly feminine blouses with little tassels down the front. If there were guests to sherry or ‘warish’ dinner, she behaved formally and discussed the War Cabinet. If there weren’t, the subjects she chose depended on whether Ernest was at home or at the BBC. If he was at his place at the head of the table, she discussed what she would like to do with one or two of the other announcers; if she was alone with Marjorie, she never failed to lower her voice and say: ‘Well, my dear—is it a success?’ For Bess had been more or less the cause of the marriage, or at any rate the instrument of it, and for a time there did seem to be a doubt of its success. But that applied to the early stages of any marriage, didn’t it? Was it a success now? Marjorie was rather difficult to draw out. It was often difficult to know if she was merely reserved, or somewhat evasive.