Chapter 2
Beatrice
Running has never been my strong suit. Running down the main road in the pitch-black in a pair of wellies and a ball gown I last wore age sixteen at my year eleven prom could be an Olympic sport, particularly as the obstacle course of potholes has grown more treacherous since this time last year.
Leaping over one crater and splashing through another, I try not to think about the fact it hasn’t rained for a week and I have no idea what liquid may have just spattered up my dress outside of a village pub on a Sunday evening.
‘Bea, wellies!’ Tracy shouts from behind the bar as the door swings open and hits the umbrella stand on the other side with the force of my entrance.
‘Am I late? Have I missed it?’ I rush, too excited to take heed of the landlady.
‘You will if you traipse any more sheep shit across my carpet. I’m still trying to get rid of the smell of the pigs.’ Tracy points her finger at me as she swipes up three empty pint glasses in her spare hand.
‘Sorry, duck, I reckon that could be me.’ Nick, another local regular, sniffs his jacket and looks apologetic.
Tracy only rolls her eyes and signals again for me to lose the shoes.
Kicking them off, I line them up next to the others that have been banished to the beer garden for the evening and re-enter barefoot.
‘One word about my feet and I’ll call the council and tell them about you all standing out there with that hairdryer pretending to catch people speeding.
’ Pointing my finger mostly at Bill who is both a busybody and the sort of bloke who always gives you one too many kisses on the cheek when he greets you, I make my way across the sticky patches of carpet to the congregation of familiar faces gathered around the table closest to the TV.
The television set would hardly put the Odeon to shame, but it’s a modest little set-up, just large enough that the old folks can still see the ball when they have the Euros on, but just small enough that Tracy can quickly toss a cardboard box over it when the TV licence twats come moseying around.
Tonight, however, the crowd is so dense around the screen that I have to tiptoe, peering over the sea of blue rinses and balding heads, just to catch a glimpse of my most anticipated watch of the year.
I could watch at home, in the comfort of my pyjamas, and with a drink I don’t have to pay for, but then I wouldn’t get to see Al in his three-piece tweed suit, or Barbara wearing the fascinator she wore to her daughter’s wedding ten years before I was born.
This is not your average village pub. This is the Big Apple, New York, Lincolnshire.
The local pub, well, the only pub for at least ten miles.
Named after, you guessed it, a rather large apple that grew on this land, which was once an orchard, back in 1672.
And it is perhaps the only pub that cares more about the BAFTAs than the World Cup.
‘There he is!’ Sandra springs out of her wheelchair to point at the screen and the congregation bursts out in a rumble of excited chittering. Resorting to standing on a chair to see, I finally catch sight of who is causing such a commotion: Eddie Cavendish, actor, superstar, and our local boy.
Eddie Cavendish did what so many have failed to do: he got out, he left Lincolnshire, he made something of himself, and he never looked back. Eddie Cavendish did exactly what I have always dreamed of. He is the living proof that it’s possible.
‘And the BAFTA for Leading Actor goes to …’ the announcer pauses.
‘Come on, Eddie.’
‘Go on, son.’
‘Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.’
The pub erupts during the television’s silence.
A stranger could walk in any moment and assume we’re a bunch of gamblers with a high-stakes bet on the horses, and I honestly wouldn’t blame them.
Awards season sends us lot crazy. I join in, my heart in my throat, only allowing enough air to squeeze through for me to chant his name under my breath as though casting a spell that will guarantee his win.
I don’t hear his name called, but with the way the pints go flying across the room and even the most elderly of the crowd are up on the tables celebrating, I think it’s safe to assume he’s done it again.
It never gets old, seeing him win. I never knew him – he’d moved away long before I was born – but most people here helped to raise him, and whether we see him win one award or hundreds, each one is still as special as the last.
Thankfully, after the first time, Tracy had the foresight to only serve her pints in plastic cups on BAFTA night but it turns out Batemans is particularly hard to scrub out of woodchip wallpaper so I’m sure I shall be roped in to help with that later on.
‘He’s a good lad, in’t he, our Eddie.’ Barbara takes a seat beside me as we both retreat to the bar as an impromptu conga line breaks out and takes a tour around the fruit machine.
It quickly disperses when Bill, its leader, tries to direct it into the ladies’ loos. ‘It’ll be you we’re cheering on soon.’
Barbara nudges my elbow with a grin. Her drink sloshes onto my dress with the motion.
Almost as soon as the words come out of her mouth, that all too familiar lump forms in my throat.
‘Yeah.’ I laugh breathily. ‘I wish.’ Barbara’s droplets of stout dribble down my ankle and I swipe them away and attempt to hide the expression on my face with my hair for a second of respite.
‘You should write a film about us lot.’ Barbara’s face is dead serious despite the fact she’s dressed like the dusty undead mother of the bride and knocking pints back like she’s dying of thirst. ‘Don’t you reckon, Trace?’
The landlady is beckoned over and Barbara repeats her new idea. The thick taste of failure still clings to my throat and I have to speak quietly so as not to unleash too many emotions. ‘Can I have a lemonade please, Tracy?’
‘You not keen on the idea, Bea?’ Not a beat of the conversation is dropped as she sprays my drink into a plastic cup without breaking eye contact.
I scan the room, checking out my muses. Inspiration is thin.
Bill is leaning over the fruit machine with his pint sloshed down the leg of his trousers in a way that to anyone having missed the lager-filled shower we’ve all just had, it would look suspiciously like he couldn’t be arsed to get up and visit the facilities.
The ladies that run the local preschool are letting their hair down and won’t stop singing show tunes rather badly (despite the fact that the jukebox is still slogging its way through Iron Maiden’s entire discography that Cerys, Tracy’s daughter, queued as soon as she got home from school).
The local farmers line the bar in their Schoffels, talking a little too intensely about the weather.
And Jimmy sits in his usual spot in the corner, taking it all in.
‘I don’t even think Shakespeare could do this place justice. New York is somewhere that has to be seen to be believed.’ Tracy gives me a knowing look.
‘What are you writing at the minute, Beatrice?’ Barbara asks, and I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth.
‘You know, this and that.’ I’m purposely vague.
How can I tell them that I haven’t so much as touched my laptop in six months, and I haven’t written in even longer?
How can I tell them that my mind is suddenly empty of any sort of creative thought and yet two years ago I was supposed to be the next best thing?
Returning home a failure is embarrassing enough, but returning home a failure when everyone still believes you’re to be the next person to put their tiny hamlet on the map, now that is a kind of shame that I can hardly put into words.
I am a failure. I left my home eight years ago with the thought that I would never return, that by twenty-six I’d have a few blockbusters under my belt and be posting photos of my Miami pool on Facebook rather than fishing my phone out of a cowpat for the third time this week.
Well, perhaps not Miami, or a blockbuster, but at least earning enough money in the film industry to keep up my rent on my tiny London flat. I can’t even afford Grimsby these days.
No, this ‘hot, young screenwriter’, as the Daily Mail once called me (and we all know that they’re a paragon of truth) came back home to live with her grandparents two years ago, left a career and a life in London, to work days on Big Apple Farm and work nights in the Big Apple pub.
It must have been some mammoth apple back in the day seeing as just about everything in this square mile is named after it.
But that’s what people quickly come to realise about this place; it’s repetitious, uninspired, and with nothing else to shout about apart from an over engorged fruit and a bloke that lived here thirty years ago who’s now on the telly.
The people of this place are filled with too much optimism, too much hope for something special to come along and make their struggles feel worthwhile, so they refuse to admit that my chance at my dream is over, and I really am nothing special.
‘Actually, Tracy, can you just stick a gin in there, please?’ I hand my cup back to the barmaid and she adds a double measure. No one knows you better than the person serving you drinks, and I’m grateful that Tracy shifts the conversation.
‘You seen how dear they’re selling them tates for up on the corner of Johnson’s farm there, Barbara?’
‘Oo I know, four quid! I’d want ’um to be plated in gold for that price.’
Raising my plastic cup in thanks, I escape into the pub whilst Barbara is preoccupied with talking about the price of potatoes back in 1960.
Weaving my way back across the room, I finally manage to find a space just big enough to sit down on the carpet in front of the TV.
I used to do the same at home on a Saturday morning when I was a kid: sit right in front of the huge box TV so close that I could feel the static pulsing from the screen.
Mum would always tell me off. ‘Your eyes’ll go square,’ she’d shout from the kitchen, so I’d shuffle back an inch or two on the ugly patterned carpet, without taking my eyes off the TV.
I’d watch film after film, VHS when I was really small, then DVDs.
Mum and Dad worked long hours and there was never much time, or money, for going out, so I’d explore the world through the screen.
Learn things that no one in New York could ever teach me.
Sometimes I’d catch snippets on Film4 when they’d play the same films over and over on a cycle for weeks and I could just about piece together Pollyanna and Back to the Future after catching them both repeatedly in different places in the run time, thanks to the pigeons nesting on the aerial and interfering with the signal for years as Grandad never had the heart to shoo them off.
That was all I had ever wanted to do, to be a part of that whole world – actress, writer, tea-maker, any department that would have me I’d be happy with, just as long as I got to live the magic of film every day of my life.
But my dad worked on the docks, and Mum worked at the local primary school.
We lived in Lincolnshire, where the buses hardly come and the only regular train goes to Skegness and back, and every one of our industries have struggled for as long as I can remember.
Ten-year-old Beatrice could never understand how much that would make a difference.
Ten-year-old Beatrice was so taken by the script of Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, so taken by the vibrancy of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet, so taken by the immensity of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, and so in love with the magic of film that nothing felt impossible.
‘Do you have any advice for anyone looking to get into the film industry?’ the interviewer on the screen asks and hands the microphone to Edward Cavendish.
He beams, and it’s obvious he hasn’t been on the waiting list for our local NHS dentist, as his teeth are perfectly aligned and white, not like the greying gravestones you often see in this neck of the woods.
‘So many people will tell you that this industry is all about connections, who you know, who can give you a chance, but something that cannot be formulated, and that sets people apart from the rest, is connection with an audience. If you can connect with an audience, make them feel seen, make them feel at home, you don’t need Steven Spielberg on speed dial.
And hard work: put yourself out there, make yourself seen, don’t give them the chance to ignore you. ’
I sit, on the beer-stained carpet of the Big Apple pub in New York, Lincolnshire, feeling that warm tingle in the pit of my stomach that I used to feel watching Lucy step through the wardrobe to Narnia on my purple box TV.
But this time I’m twenty-six, not ten. This time I’m ignoring my reality to allow the excitement for the future to bubble in me for the first time in so, so long.
This time I’m watching a man who grew up on the farm I now work on win awards in ways I never knew possible for people like us.
Anything is possible at the BAFTAs, and for one night only, I’m going to allow myself to dream like I did all those years ago.