The Story of My Life | Page 4

It is a delightful town, and it was a happy chance that made me a native of Warwickshire, Shakespeare's own county. Sarah Kemble married Mr. Siddons at Coventry too--another happy omen.
I have acted twice in my native town in old days, but never in recent years. In 1904 I planned to act there again, but unfortunately I was taken ill at Cambridge, and the doctors would not allow me to go to Coventry. The morning my company left Cambridge without me, I was very miserable. It is always hateful to disappoint the public, and on this occasion I was compelled to break faith where I most wished to keep it. I heard afterwards from my daughter (who played some of my parts instead of me) that many of the Coventry people thought I had never meant to come at all. If this should meet their eyes, I hope they will believe that this was not so. My ambition to play at Coventry again shall be realized yet.[1]
[Footnote 1: Since I wrote this, I have again visited my native town--this time to receive its civic congratulations on the occasion of my jubilee, and as recently as March of the present year I acted at the new Empire Theater.]
At one time nothing seemed more unlikely than that I should be able to act in another Warwickshire town, a town whose name is known all over the world. But time and chance and my own great wish succeeded in bringing about my appearance at Stratford-on-Avon.
I can well imagine that the children of some strolling players used to have a hard time of it, but my mother was not one to shirk her duties. She worked hard at her profession and yet found it possible not to drag up her children, to live or die as it happened, but to bring them up to be healthy, happy, and wise--theater-wise, at any rate. When her babies were too small to be left at the lodgings (which she and my father took in each town they visited as near to the theater as possible), she would bundle us up in a shawl and put us to sleep in her dressing-room. So it was, that long before I spoke in a theater, I slept in one.
Later on, when we were older and mother could leave us at home, there was a fire one night at our lodgings, and she rushed out of the theater and up the street in an agony of terror. She got us out of the house all right, took us to the theater, and went on with the next act as if nothing had happened. Such fortitude is commoner in our profession, I think, than in any other. We "go on with the next act" whatever happens, and if we know our business, no one in the audience will ever guess that anything is wrong--that since the curtain last went down some dear friend has died, or our children in the theatrical lodgings up the street have run the risk of being burnt to death.
My mother had eleven children altogether, but only nine survived their infancy, and of these nine, my eldest brother, Ben, and my sister Florence have since died. My sister Kate, who left the stage at an age when most of the young women of the present day take to it for the first time, and made an enduring reputation in a few brilliant years, was the eldest of the family. Then came a sister, who died, and I was the third. After us came Ben, George, Marion, Flossie, Charles, Tom, and Fred. Six out of the nine have been on the stage, but only Marion, Fred, and I are there still.
Two or three members of this large family, at the most, were in existence when I first entered a theater in a professional capacity, so I will leave them all alone for the present. I had better confess at once that I don't remember this great event, and my sister Kate is unkind enough to say that it never happened--to me! The story, she asserts, was told of her. But without damning proofs she is not going to make me believe it! Shall I be robbed of the only experience of my first eight years of life? Never!
During the rehearsals of a pantomime in a Scottish town (Glasgow, I think. Glasgow has always been an eventful place to me!), a child was wanted for the Spirit of the Mustard-pot. What more natural than that my father should offer my services? I had a shock of pale yellow hair, I was small enough to be put into the property mustard-pot, and the Glasgow stage manager would easily assume that I had inherited talent. My father had acted with Macready in