I
[A CHILD OF THE STAGE]
1848-1856
This is the first thing I remember.
In the corner of a lean-to whitewashed attic stood a fine, plain, solid oak bureau. By climbing up on to this bureau I could see from the window the glories of the sunset. My attic was on a hill in a large and busy town, and the smoke of a thousand chimneys hung like a gray veil between me and the fires in the sky. When the sun had set, and the scarlet and gold, violet and primrose, and all those magic colors that have no names, had faded into the dark, there were other fires for me to see. The flaming forges came out, and terrified while they fascinated my childish imagination.
What did it matter to me that I was locked in and that my [father] and mother, with my elder sister Kate, were all at the theater? I had the sunset, the forges, and the oak bureau.
I cannot say how old I was at this time, but I am sure that it wasn't long after my [birth] (which I can't remember, although I have often been asked to decide in which house at [Coventry] I was born!). At any rate, I had not then seen a theater, and I took to the stage before many years had passed over my head.
Putting together what I remembered, and such authentic history as there is of my parents' movements, I gather that this attic was in theatrical lodgings in [Glasgow]. [My father] was an actor, my mother an actress, and they were at this time on tour in Scotland. Perhaps this is the place to say that father was the son of an Irish builder, and that he eloped in a chaise with mother, who was the daughter of a Scottish minister. I am afraid I know no details of their romance. As for my less immediate ancestry, it is "wropt in mystery." Were we all people of the stage? There was a [Daniel Terry] who was not only a famous actor in his day, but a friend of [Sir Walter Scott]'s. There was an [Eliza Terry], an actress whose portrait appears in The Dramatic Mirror in 1847. But so far as I know I cannot claim kinship with either Eliza or Daniel.
MR. AND MRS. BENJAMIN TERRY