A long time ago, in what seems like another life, I spent a year at RADA. Yes, I know. This makes me sound fancy. What can I say? I was a very determined young woman with a head full of Ibsen and a craving for universal approval. My adolescence had come to find High Wycombe stifling and there was a world out there I felt I had to conquer. I recall telling everyone I met in London that I came from ‘near Cookham, where Stanley Spencer lives’ in a bid to spice up my biography. High Wycombe to me was painfully dull.

Such pretentions are transparent, though: if your talents are lacking it doesn’t matter how colourful your origins. By the end of the first term I’d learnt, rather expensively, that my acting career did not have the legs I thought it did due to my very limited range. Back home in Wycombe I made a fine Snow White, could hold a tune and recite Tennyson or Milton with ease, attributes that were enough to win me a coveted scholarship. And yet, a classical actress should not receive laughs from the audience when her Desdemona is being strangled, her Juliet should not make the director hastily recast her as the Nurse, and she most definitely should not have it in her head that when reading Chekov it’s acceptable – appropriate, even – to do a Russian accent. I was guilty of all these once I began to ‘tread the boards’ in London, and worse. It was as if I had a pair of Andersen’s red shoes that made me do these things.

My fellow thespians were curiously nice about it, however. ‘You should do comedy, Edna!’ they said, no doubt relieved to know someone like me who could make the poorest of actors look reasonable. But I wasn’t there to be a comedy actress, I was there to be taken very, very seriously. Life to me then was all about gritty realism. We were not yet in the age where the phrase ‘hard-hitting’ was bandied around at the drop of a hat, and yet its essence existed keenly for me. I wanted a role to push myself physically and the audience emotionally. I wanted to represent the working class. I wanted, I suppose, what I couldn’t have, and instead made everybody laugh without even trying.

It was a strange state to find myself in, this apparently comic facade of mine, for I actually lived a depressing existence. Home was a draughty attic room in a crumbling four-storey house in Highgate and I had so little money that most days it was either a case of the bus or lunch, rarely both. I grew very thin. I had few friends, and those I did have I found exhausting to keep up with (Michael Gambon was a fellow student. I was out of my depth). I also worked part-time as a barmaid in a pub where staff set the level of inebriation. In the back of my mind I fantasised myself as Ella Dawson from Patrick Hamilton’s ‘Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky’, a part I auditioned for without success. Indeed, a lack of success rapidly became the defining feature of that year and I left RADA under the guise of homesickness with no one challenging my decision to depart.

The reason I wrote this blog is twofold. I want to ask you when was the first time you ‘flew the nest’ from High Wycombe or your Bucks town (if you have at all) and what you missed most of all about it. Returning from London where the ‘pea-souper’ fog still existed, I rediscovered High Wycombe’s cleanliness, greenness and community vibe – attributes that, now I’ve lived in the sticks of Cornwall, central Newcastle, North London and New York, I find I miss when I’m away from my hometown. Are there any places in Bucks you feel to be unique?

The second reason is that Michael Gambon – who I’m sure never laughed at me – is free to do other things now that Dumbledore is finally dead. This autumn he will he headlining the National Theatre’s new season, starring alongside the wonderful Frances de la Tour and Alex Jennings in Alan Bennett’s ‘The Habit of Art’, a play about the relationship between Benjamin Britten and his friend WH Auden. It will be extraordinary, of course, and please consider this as a shameless plug: The National Theatre is a wonderful place and is not as expensive as you may think, and always worth it. Some tickets are available for £10 if you book early enough, and you don’t have to be a ‘concession’ in order to qualify.

Look sharp. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Thank you for reading. Oh, and if Eris is able to upload a picture, here is one of lovely Julianne Moore as Ariel in ‘The Little Mermaid’. It has absolutely nothing to do with this blog, but is the last round of stunning Disney recreations by photographer Annie Leibovitz. I like it.

By Edna Welthorpe