Maggie Smith: A Biography Read Online Free Page B

glad to get away.
    Nat’s family was religious, in spite of his father’s faults, and young Nat was a dedicated church-goer and choirboy. Though their domestic circumstances were penurious, Jesmond, the Newcastle suburb where they lived, had a touch of class. Nat particularly liked the ecclesiastical garb of surplices and cassocks which was provided by a rich ship-owner in the parish church; underneath, he wore his ordinary clothes, unlike the other boys, who all wore Eton suits. In later life, Nat could preach and he could lecture and he always enjoyed the ceremonies of the church. A performing instinct of some kind was in his genes. He had, in fact, been named after an actor, his uncle Nathaniel Gregory, who had joined the army as an entertainer during the Boer War at the turn of the century. This dramatic relation figured only once in Nat’s memory. As a boy of twelve or thirteen, he remembers a middle-aged Uncle Nat paying a call, appearing over the brow of a Jesmond slope in a tight black coat with an astrakhan collar, wielding a malacca cane with a silver knob. There was no question, said Nat, of him not being an actor. ‘He was pedantic of speech and quoted Shakespeare all the time, which staggered the household.’ Shortly afterwards, Uncle Nat, who was appearing at the Newcastle Hippodrome, cycled to Whitley Bay to visit Doris Rogers, the girl he was planning to marry. He suffered a heart attack, fell off his bike and died on the spot.
    A year or so later, in 1918, young Nat left school and began menial work in the local medical college. He took a diploma as a laboratory technician and learned so much about morbid pathology that he was lecturing in the subject three years later, at the age of nineteen. One of the Newcastle laboratory demonstrators was appointed to a children’s hospital in the East End of London. He wanted a technician and offered Nat the job; thus Nat moved south and started work in the Princess Elizabeth Hospital next to the Meredith and Drew biscuit factory in Shadwell.
    Meg, whom Nat had met in Newcastle, where she had lived for a while in digs, had already moved to London. Six years older than Nat, she was living in Russell Square and working as head cashier for the London office of Maxwell Hart in Victoria Street. The company designed and built municipal parks, tennis courts, bowling greens and golf courses. Meg had originally worked for them in Glasgow. She married Nat at the Presbyterian Church in Regent Square, Grays Inn Road, on 2 January 1928. She continued working, but not for long: Ian and Alistair were born at the end of the year. Meg – christened Margaret Little Hutton – was of mixed Celtic extraction. Her grandmother was born in Newry, Northern Ireland. Her father was an illiterate Glaswegian shipyard worker who could do no more than make his mark on Meg’s birth certificate. Meg left school in 1911 or 1912 to work in a laundry where, says Ian, ‘the hard and degrading work instilled in her a lifelong horror of such soul-destroying employment’. She must have acquired secretarial skills at night school, because she subsequently worked in the offices of the Gleniffer Motor Company in Glasgow (and in Fraserburgh on the east coast of Scotland) which made marine engines. She then joined Maxwell Hart in 1918 or 1919. She was obviously highly valued by the company, and was appointed to the London office at some time in the early 1920s. Meg had a natural flair for figures. Nat said she could add up three columns of pounds, shillings and pence simultaneously. She counted money carefully all her life. But Ian also recalls her flair for drawing, which both he and Alistair inherited. She was practical and resourceful, and made all of Margaret’s clothes when she was growing up.
    Once married, Nat and Meg found a house in Barkingside, Ilford. Over the ten years they spent in Ilford, they owned three houses, never selling one when they bought the next, but renting it out. Meg