One story was with Nanny working for a posh family living in the Royal Crescent in Bath.
“Well Nanny how nice of you to come to us and a blue uniform too I do like blue now I will introduce you to baby and the others” “Others? I was told you only have one baby” “Quite right Nanny only one baby and 5 other children now come along to the nursery”.
One daughter was to be suffering from psychosomatic disorder and would wake up in the night screaming in terror. The young actress of just 8 years was quite brilliant. We were amazed that she was able to act like that at her age and at the same time have school lessons from a tutor between shots. She said with disarming simplicity “Oh it’s easy. When I am acting I am her and when I am not I am me”.
We cast Annabelle Lanyon as the older child aged 10. She was in fact 21, but looked much, much younger. In a restaurant one evening the waiter took all our orders and then turned to Annabelle saying “..and what would the young lady like, we have the children’s menu over the page”. Annabelle gently replied “oh that’s fine but I would like gin and tonic and then an entrecote steak, rare, with a large glass of your house red please”. Poor waiter, not his fault.
To shoot a scene of Nanny taking all of the children for a walk in the Royal crescent was a massive job. First we had to cover the road with peat to hide the yellow lines then employ loads of extras to stand in front of the parking meters but the biggest problem were the TV aerials which did not exist in 1936. We managed to persuade all the residents of that huge crescent to let us take them down and replace them with new ones when we had finished.
We could not record any dialogue in the park oposite because of the traffic noise and the police sirens so we moved the unit 200kms away to shoot the dialogue in the scene in Dartington Park near Totnes in Devon.
