IN PARTNERSHIP WITH AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH FASHION Marit Allen Interviewed by Alistair O’Neill C1046/13 IMPORTANT Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 [0]20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators. NATIONAL LIFE STORY COLLECTION INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET Title Page Ref. No.: C1046/13/01-8 Collection title: Oral History of British Fashion Interviewee’s surname: Allen Title: Ms Interviewee’s forenames: Marit Sex: Female Occupation: Film Costume Designer Date of birth: Mother’s occupation: Hotelier Father’s occupation: Hotelier Date(s) of recording: 09.08.2005, 06.09.2005, 21.09.2005, 06.10.2005 Location of interview: Interviewee’s home, London SW6 Name of interviewer: Alistair O’Neill Type of recorder: Marantz CP430 Total no. of tapes: 8 Type of tape: D60 Mono or stereo: Stereo Speed: N/A Noise reduction: Dolby B Original or copy: Original Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: © The British Library Board Interviewer’s comments: Marit Allen Page 1 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] Tape 1 Side A [part 1] Can I just ask you what you had for breakfast this morning? Yes, you can. I had wheatflakes, blueberries and raspberries. Yes. With some special new milk that contains fatty acids, called Omega milk. And what are the benefits of that? It is so that you don’t have to eat so much fish to get the benefits of the equivalent of fish oil. I understand. And did you have it on your balcony? No I didn’t, I had it in the kitchen but I should have had it on the balcony. I think we’ll have lunch on the balcony. Oh right, okay. I seem to be, yes that’ll be perfect. Now I seem to have – I’m just checking – that seems fine, I seem to be up and you seem to be a little bit down, so I’m just going to try and adjust this again. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but one’s own voice sounds so peculiar when recorded. I’m… D’you not find this? I’m fairly used to it, because it’s just through teaching I don’t seem to mind, but I think if you’re not regularly used to it, it does sound rather strange. Marit Allen Page 2 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] It sounds so peculiar. Now I just seem to have gone too loud on my own now, so I’m just bringing it down. Now that seems fine for me. Okay, how does that seem for me? I think it seems fine for you too. Good. Terribly fiddly, these buttons. This is, it’s a Marantz system and the very strange and slightly old-fashioned way the National Sound Archive believe that this technology is better and it’s more archival than CDs. Ah, interesting. This is actually audio tape. They will transfer them all eventually? Yes. On to something smaller. Now I just need to turn this down a bit. My partner is a sound engineer. Oh really? So he’s totally into equipment and he’s just had to completely revamp all his equipment because movie makers now are getting so highly technical that they’re going, they’re Marit Allen Page 3 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] jumping ten-year leaps between movies even, you know, so that the sound requirements are so incredibly varied and… And does he work in film particularly, as a sound engineer? Yeah he does, yes. My twin brother works in BBC Sound Archive. He trained as a sound engineer, but he’s archive based now, which is quite nice. Yes, well he knows all about this equipment, yes. More than I do, I’m a bit of a novice I think. [laughs] Okay right, I think that’s fine. Good. Okay, interviewing Marit Allen, Tuesday the ninth of August 2005. Marit, can I ask you where you were born and when? I was born in 1941 underneath a staircase in little nursing home in Appleton, which was then in Lancashire and now is in Cheshire. And I was born under the staircase because there was an air raid at the time. My poor mother had a pretty rough ride I think and she didn’t think much of me when I arrived, so I’m told, or so she told me. Yes. She denied the fact that I was her baby, she said, ‘That can’t be my baby, she’s far too ugly’. [laughs] My nose was squished against my face and I had a purple V on my forehead, she said. And so she said there had to be some mistake, but that in fact was where I was born and we became the very best of friends lifelong afterwards. And what did your father think of it? My father, I don’t even know if he was around, because he was in Africa during World War Two, in North Africa, so I don’t know if he was very close by when I was born, I Marit Allen Page 4 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] don’t think so. And my mother and I struggled along together for the first four years till he came back. Right. What’s your earliest memory? I suppose my earliest memory is of gas masks and looking for small mice in the cellar and kittens, if possible. Anything that had a heartbeat and was down in the basement of the house that we lived in. So I suppose that was a distraction, it was a sort of – I remember Bing Crosby’s boys, I remember my mother calling him Uncle Bing and being very attached to the songs that Bing Crosby sang. Early – those were my nursery rhymes I think, because my mother was Norwegian and so she didn’t know any English nursery rhymes and she hadn’t taught me Norwegian yet, so she used to sing songs of the day for me, so I grew up with a ridiculous sort of, a whole catalogue of pop songs that she used to like in the early 1940s and they were mostly nonsense rhymes and sort of onomatopoeic things, things that she found entertaining about English. Those are the first things I remember I suppose. I remember also, I remember news bulletins. I remember my parents listening, with desperate seriousness, to the news bulletins as they came in, of the war and being told to be quiet and having to, not understanding exactly why, but having this overall feeling of darkness and lights flashing and radio bulletins. So how was it that your Norwegian mother found herself in England in the early forties? Well, she came over to England as a student, she actually got a scholarship to go to Oxford from northern Norway, she studied in Trondheim, and a friend of her father’s thought that it was better that she should study economics so she went to a college of economics in Manchester, and there she met my father and she married him in Norway on an Atlantic island in a wind storm in June, I suppose 1938, and then she came to live with him in England and then the war happened. And then she was cut off from her family for the years of the war. And I just found documentation of my grandfather’s letters to her, trying desperately to reach her during the war. And they had to write via Portugal, they had a connection with Portugal who could somehow get letters over to Norway and I think they probably heard from each other four or five times during the whole course of the war. And so she was young and pretty and vivacious and crazy about dancing and she was stuck in a Marit Allen Page 5 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] small town in Lancashire, trying to keep a business together and a child together while my dad went off to North Africa, so she had a tough time. So do you have any early memories of your grandparents from the maternal side, of the time? Well yes, when I was four and my father came back, my parents didn’t recognise each other and they’d lost any sense of the relationship they had. So they sent me off to my grandmother’s, and they sent me off probably at about Easter time in the year my dad came back and came and picked me up in September and when they picked me up I couldn’t speak any English any more and I was completely immersed in my whole family in Norway and my cousins and my grandparents, I loved them dearly, and it was very much the perfect oasis for a child, because everything was there, even though they’d been through the war and been occupied, they had butter and bread and cheese and milk and all the things that we didn’t have, you know. And it was a huge family and lots of children, which I didn’t, I wasn’t surrounded by any children at all as I was growing up in England.