Before I began this meditation I was looking at the wooden flooring in my lounge. So much more healthy than a carpet for an asthmatic like myself. I have been prompted to look at my floor because I was thinking about another kind of floor: a stone tiled floor. Marcus Aurelius, my namesake, would walk on stone tiled floors in his villas of course or marble or mosaic ones. In imitation of him, I have a stone tiled floor in my small bathroom and marble effect walls in the shower. In the corner is a terracotta amphora (a large urn) which someone gave me as a birthday gift several years ago. I also have some facsimile tiles on the walls from the baths at Ostia Antiqua in Rome, when I visited there. A little touch of Ancient Rome in New Malden!

The reason I have been musing about stone floors is that someone from my youth has recently contacted me via this blog. We have have not been in touch for many years. Paul Cook was a school friend of mine – we were in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ together when we were 15 years old. When Louis Maidens, (our English teacher who directed the school plays) left the school after our ‘O’ levels ,we both joined a new drama group in our local area – Teesside Youth Theatre – at the start of our Sixth Form in 1970! A long.long, time ago. How the years flow by.

He has been putting together information about Ormesby Hall, the local National Trust property, just outside Middlesbrough. The Youth Theatre would often rehearse there on Sunday afternoons. We used to rehearse in the large stone floored kitchen, which was presumable where the servants dined in times gone by.  It wasn’t ‘below stairs’, however but at the side of the house. He has been asking me for memories of rehearsing at the Hall and the kitchen and its stone floors came to mind. Since being in touch with him by email the other day, the memory of those kitchen rehearsals has lingered. 

My first memories of rehearsing there were in the winter of 1970-71 when we were devising a modern version of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’. The final script would be written by another member of the Youth Theatre, Robert Holman, who eventually went on to be a successful playwright and sadly died last December. The production was to be performed at various venues in the area.

I remember the kitchen was freezing cold, because of those floors. This was very appropriate for our production – we soon got into character! We had to light a fire in the big fireplace before we started rehearsing, I remember.  The high-ceilinged room soon warmed up from the fire, however, and we warmed up by moving around in rehearsal. We wanted to get up from our chairs as soon as possible to get warm so reading through scenes was brisk!

The kitchen soon became cosy and Christmassy and even though we were rehearsing a modern version of Dickens’ famous opus, the Victorian surroundings helped us get into the atmosphere of the story. At least I thought so. I was playing Bob Cratchit and I remember rehearsing the Christmas dinner scene on that stone floor and surrounding brick walls, feeling as if I had one foot in 1970 and the other in 1843! We were definitely in 1970 when we performed the scene for real:  the Christmas dinner we had to ecstatically enthuse over consisted of cold tinned vegetables (including potatoes) and the Christmas goose was substituted by slices of spam!

Being in the kitchen was so very different from rehearsing at my school, St Mary’s College, which was a fairly new building with polished floors or at Kirby College in Middlesbrough, where we had opened their brand new theatre with ‘The Fire Raisers’ the previous September. But that draughty kitchen, because it was such an unusual place to rehearse,  became ‘our space’, our den, our club house over the months we were there and I have fond memories of it.

The place inspired me too: my first production at my school, in 1984, was my own modern version of ‘A Christmas Carol’. My two years at the Youth Theatre helped to form me as any specialised Youth group should. Not only did I have the chance to act, but also to direct and write scripts too and  to be with other people who were generally as committed to performing as I was. There was no Drama at my school once Louis Maidens left and no A Level Drama either. So the Youth Theatre was my lifeline.            

In the following summer, we rehearsed Shakespeare’s ‘Measure For Measure’ there for performances at Middlesbrough Little Theatre in September. The kitchen remained cool even in the summer months! We did rehearse outside though on the lawn sometimes and I also remember rehearsing on the lawn for my final production, ‘Progress in Unity’ another one devised by ourselves and written by Robert Holman, about the history of the area. That production was performed at Middlesbrough Town Hall in September 1972 just before I went to university.

My special memory of being at Ormesby Hall with the Youth Theatre was performing a one act play in the drawing room. This was as part of an arts evening as far as I remember. We performed an Edwardian comedy ‘Playgoers’ by Arthur Wing Pinero. It was about an aristocratic lady unsuccessfully trying to rehearse her servants in a play. I played her equally harassed husband and I think I may have directed it too. The drawing room was the perfect setting for the play and we used some of the sofas and armchairs at one end of the room for our scene with the audience sitting round us in a semi-circle.  It was like begin on a film set in away or in an episode of ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, which was on the TV at the time. And it was warm of course!

Ormesby Hall has been owned by the Pennyman family since 1599 and when Jim Pennyman died in 1961, it was bequeathed to the National Trust with his wife Ruth being allowed to remain living there. Jim and Ruth Pennyman were great supporters of the Arts and Ruth had been a poet and playwright herself. She had generously loaned us the huge kitchen for rehearsals. I think she provided the logs for the fire too. Sometimes she would wander in with a tray of homemade sausage rolls and cakes or they would be left out for us. She was very welcoming and interested in us but never intruded. Ruth was a very generous supporter of the Youth Theatre and therefore of the artistic development of its members.

In the 1940’s she was also an active and generous supporter of the early days of Theatre Workshop, led by Joan Littlewood, which eventually settled at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London. In the 40’s they appeared at the early version of the Little Theatre but were billeted at Ormesby Hall. This led to an annual summer school there. Years later, at Stratford East, Joan Littlewood produced many innovative productions including ‘Oh What A Lovely War’ and a number of actors’ professional careers were nurtured there, including Barbara Windsor. I wonder if they rehearsed in the kitchen in the ’40’s just as we did in the ’70’s.

These days we are used to corporate and government patronage and subsidy of the Arts on a large scale and very important it is too, essential to the cultural life of the country and our own well-being. Such sponsorship was also occurring when I was a member of the Youth Theatre, of course, but then as now, there were individuals like Ruth Pennyman who generously and quietly supported local Arts groups and even professional ones in embryo like Theatre Workshop. And not only financially. -Ruth gave us premises to rehearse in and, at times, perform in. Not to mention her homemade sausage rolls and cakes! 

Where have the years gone, I ask myself, as I gaze at the candle beside me. I have begun to perceive that there are far more years behind me than are left to me – even if I become a centenarian! If so, will I still be blogging?  Or what digital format or platform will I be using over thirty years from now. Old and decrepit as I may become, perhaps I will be able to beam down into your homes (if you are still around too) and deliver my blog in person.

Marcus tells us in his Meditations (Book 6): ‘The whole of present time is a pin-prick of eternity. All things are tiny, quick-changed, evanescent’. He also describes Time as a ‘violent stream’ in Book 4. Tine does move quickly and our lives change quickly as a result. We do not see that when we are young. I am beginning to see it now.

Ave atque Vale! Hail and Farewell.

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Neilus Aurelius