Glis-Glis and my darling Uncle David

“There’s nothing worse than actors who give the impression they’ve taken on the priesthood. Acting is really about lying and, in my case, drinking coffee.” Johnny Depp


My great-uncle, David King-Wood, was an actor before the war, specialising in Shakespeare. He had a very successful stage career and appeared in a number of films also including The Quatermass Experiment, Men of Sherwood Forest and Jamboree, before the war scuppered his career, as he was needed as an interpreter, being fluent in five languages – one of which was Japanese. In the early 1950s, he moved to New York, where he became a teacher at the boys’ preparatory school, St Bernard’s, which he adored, retiring at the age of 87, before passing away in 2003 at the age of 89.

Uncle David would come over every couple of years or so to stay with us when I was a child. I absolutely adored his visits. He was great fun for my sister and I as youngsters, and as we got older, we began to appreciate his vast intellect and great story-telling. Getting him to tell stories of his days as an actor, however, was like getting blood out of a stone.

He was extremely particular about language and spoke with a very gentle, beautifully English voice. Indeed, his speaking voice gained him a great deal of his work. After he died, a lady kindly sent us a recording she had booked David to do of him reading some poetry, which you could do in those days. And it was very lovely. Sam Butler, a trustee of St Bernard’s summed up Uncle David’s view of the English language when talking at his memorial service:

“David possessed a very English certainty about language which I believe was of great use to him in the classroom. Thirteen year olds specialise in being imprecise, sometimes from laziness and sometimes from a malicious joy in frustrating those who would lead us into better habits. I know in my day we frequently peppered our papers and classroom answers with such ill-chosen phrases as, "kind of," "sort of," and the truly dreadful, "like." Whenever we did so David would pounce, and ask, not always gently, "kind of what, dear boy?", "sort of like what, if I may be so bold?"; and go on to tell us that if we wanted to be thought of as possessing even moderate intelligence we must excise all such vagueness from our minds. As you can see, this lesson has remained with me for the last thirty years, which is why I'm talking about it now; and has led me to some fairly draconian prejudices. For example, I once caught Updike describing something in one of his lesser novels as "kind of." I haven't been able to read him since.”

Of all the times that David came to visit us, I can only remember him telling us two stories of his acting, and they both involved animals. The first was that when he was filming Men of Sherwood Forest, his character Guy of Gisborne, was supposed to have two fearsome Irish wolf-hounds, who eventually, when Gisbourne met his demise, falling out of a tree, would savage him. Unfortunately, the dogs were as soft as could be. So, instead of looking vicious, would go over and start to lick David. David remarked that his backside was black and blue by the end of that day as he had had to repeat falling out of a tree so many times in order to get the dogs to look anything like the savage beasts they were supposed to be.

His second story involved him playing Benedick in a run of Much Ado About Nothing at Regent’s Park. He mentioned that he had played this role when I was studying the play at A-level. When I asked him to tell me all about his production, he simply replied:

“My dear, I cannot remember a damned thing about that production except the trumpeting of those blasted elephants from the zoo next door.”

In the late 1980s through to the 1990s, my family lived in a house in Jordans in Buckinghamshire, a very picturesque Quaker village near to Beaconsfield. In Buckinghamshire dwell a little known creature – the edible dormouse (Latin name: glis-glis). I am not making this up. They are specific to a few areas in the United Kingdom and they basically move into a house and start to eat their way through whatever they can get their little paws on. They are, however, an endangered species, and not that we would ever have killed them, you did have to get a special cage from the council in order to capture them and then release them into the wild.

They look like small squirrels, mouse-like in face, but with a long bushy tail. Really very adorable little things, but incredibly noisy. They had somehow got into our roof, eaves and airing cupboard and would regularly go charging up and down the length of the house, thundering about as though they were having a party. Although, I was reliably informed once by a very droll man from the Council that Glis did not, in fact, have parties. Thanks for that – I didn’t actually think they had mini party hats on and were about to get done for having an illegal rave.

Anyway, Uncle David had heard about the Glis from my mother’s letters to him and he was beside himself with excitement at the prospect of meeting one when he came over in the summer. Capturing one was always quite momentous as we would hear the little thing in the cage, and no matter what time of day it was, my mother would inform my father that it was time to release the Glis. Whereupon, they would go to the other side of the M40 (in case they homed) and mother would get out, nightie flapping in the breeze, and the Glis would be released to the tune of Born Free by Matt Munro (well, not quite). In total, we caught over forty, so you can begin to see that this was quite a project.

By the time Uncle David came over that Summer, we were all quite dab-hands at knowing where the Glis would be. But mum and I were still slightly nervous of them because they were, after all, rodents and they jumped like a squirrel rather than running like mice and you didn’t really want one in your face, or on your head as had once happened to dad. Over the past months, the Glis had taken up residence in the airing cupboard and often you could open the door and see this little grey furry face poking out at you curled up in a little ball on a freshly ironed, warm towel, surrounded by little Glis droppings all over the clean laundry. So, having discovered that one was there, we told David that the moment had arrived for him to meet the Glis-Glis. He was utterly beside himself with glee. He was a very keen twitcher and animal lover, often going to intrepid cruises to Africa and South America to see wildlife. The Glis of Jordans were going to be just as wondrous.

Mum, David and I went to the airing cupboard and slowly opened the door. There, was a little grey furry head blinking down at us. David crept further in to get a really good look at the little creature. The Glis stayed motionless. Then, David spun around and with an enormously theatrical gesture of the hands, exclaimed,

“Well, my dears, isn’t that splendid!”

But, he had barely got the first half of the sentence out when the Glis became startled by David’s over-effusive hand gesture. The creature leapt up and started to spring towards David whose back was turned. Mum and I screamed and then did what any self-respecting person should do when an octogenarian is about to be attacked by a flying rodent. We ran for cover and left David to fend for himself. A couple of days later, David seemed to be taking great delight in sitting outside reading his book, with a large Glis sitting in a cage next to him. The smile on David’s face seemed to say ‘justice’. Who knows what went on between man and mouse in that airing cupboard. Just as he never told of his theatrical escapades, he maintained a dignified silence over his Glis experience also.