Wise Children Read online

  Backdrops of trees and flowers and fountains, a moony night, blue clouds, a carnival, a bedroom, a feast, and little men and women on metal rods, Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, all the old-timers. It was a plaything for princesses and we unpacked it out of its woodshavings with a kind of solemn delight; we hadn’t known until that very moment it was exactly what we wanted.

  We treasured that toy theatre. We played with it as if we were in church, always on Sunday afternoons, never any other time; we washed our hands, after dinner we put our best frocks on. I cried my eyes out when we were forced to part with it. It went to Sotheby’s when Brenda had her bit of trouble. You wouldn’t believe what we got for it. It kept young Tiffany in disposables until she learned to piss in a pot.

  Grandma lit the candles on our cake.

  ‘Make a wish and blow,’ she said. You can guess what wish it was these stagestruck children made.

  We closed our eyes and there we were, under the painted moon on the other side of the curtain, where the painted clouds will never move and everything is two-dimensional. Nora looked at me and I at Nora; frills, sequins, fishnet tights, high heels and feathers in our hair. We smiled. We raised our right legs, thus . . . ready for the orchestra.

  Let’s face the music and –

  Of course, we didn’t know, then, how the Hazards would always upstage us. Tragedy, eternally more class than comedy. How could mere song-and-dance girls aspire so high? We were destined, from birth, to be the lovely ephemera of the theatre, we’d rise and shine like birthday candles, then blow out. But, that birthday tea-time sixty-eight years ago, we blew out all our birthday candles with one breath and, yes, indeed! life gave us our birthday wish, in due course, because the Lucky Chances faced the music and they danced for well-nigh half a century, although we would always be on the left-hand line, hoofers, thrushes, the light relief, as you might say; bring on the bears!

  Or, bares. Our careers went down the toilet along with the profession itself. We ended up showing a leg at the fag end of vaudeville in all those touring revues with titles such as Nudes, Ahoy! Here Come the Nine O’clock Nudes! Nudes of the World! and so on, backing up Archie Rice and other comics of that ilk. The showgirls would stand there, topless, living statues, and we would do our number in and out the nipples in our tasselled bras. I saw more nipples in those last five years of touring after World War II than in all my life till then and I was brought up by a naturist, don’t you forget.

  We had a raddled middle age, all right, but I swear to you we were respectable, in youth. There was nothing so stuffy as the lives of small-time theatricals, in those days, and South London was a ghetto of chorus girls and boys and what not. In the semis, behind the dusty privet hedges, they rested between engagements, sitting on a piece of the leatherette suite in the sitting room where the fumed oak sideboard contained a single bottle of sweet sherry and half a dozen dusty glasses stood on a tarnished silver tray inscribed ‘To a great little trouper from the Merry Martins, Frinton-on-Sea, 1919’, or something like that, beneath framed photographs of girls with big thighs in tights and men in crepe hair signed with Xs galore and framed colour reproductions on the walls of scenes depicting red-nosed monks eating big meals of venison and boar.

  We begged and pleaded until Grandma stood us extra classes and after that we were the teacher’s pets, while Grandma and Miss Worthington and her old mother, who played piano, often enjoyed a port and lemon or two under the picture of ‘Simon the Cellarer’ in the back parlour behind the dance studio, as Miss Worthington chose to call it. Grandma with her little finger hoist aloft, on her best behaviour, all smiles, spitting out her famous vowels like cherrystones; she’d give a big belch in the street, afterwards, glare around, say: ‘Who let that out?’

  So it went on, year in, year out. The mirror in Miss Worthington’s front room showed two times two Chance girls, us and our reflections, doing high kicks like trick photography in flesh and blood. Bang, crash, wallop went Miss W.’s old mum on the piano, and smack! smack! smack! Miss W.’s cane on our legs but she knew her stuff, I’ll give her that. Grandma made pencil marks on the door of the breakfast room at home. Three foot, three and a half foot, four foot, four foot six, five foot, five foot two. Miss Worthington said:

  ‘They’re casting.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those girls could bring you in a bob or two, Mrs Chance,’ said Miss Worthington in her superannuated pink tutu, leaning on her cane, eyeing us in our vests and knickers, five foot two, glossy brown ringlets Grandma did up each night in rags, like as two water drops. Miss Worthington, who used to be a pro herself until her arches fell.

  ‘Only,’ she added, because she kept up with the times, ‘you’ll have to do something about those sausage curls.’

  So we were bobbed, sitting in the barber shop, swathed to our necks in hot towels, enduring the dreadful grinding crunch of the scissors, watching the mouse-brown locks fall round us to the ground; we knew that we were shedding our childhoods with those ringlets and we were pleased as punch. When we were cleaning out Grandma’s stuff, after she copped it, there was an envelope in her bottom drawer, two curls: ‘Dora’s’, tied with a blue ribbon, ‘Nora’s’, green.

  It was a panto, wasn’t it? To cut a long story short, we made our first professional appearance on any stage as birds – little brown birds, sparrows, probably, one, two, three, hop, in the forest scene in Babes in the Wood at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Grandma escorting us there and back with a half-bottle of gin in her handbag just in case.

  In case of what? In case the pubs run dry, ducky, she said.

  Identical birds. They gave us our own speciality number because we were identical. We were the ones who covered up the ‘babes’ with leaves, what’s more. By ourselves, neither of us was nothing much but put us together, people blinked. Which is Dora? Which is Nora? In those days, we even smelled the same. Phul Nana. We didn’t know any better. We used to nick it from Bon Marché.

  That first night, of all the first nights of all our years in show business, the dressing room crammed with chorus kiddies, our insides turned to water, our make-up wouldn’t stay on, nothing went right. My stocking laddered, her beak came off. All the same, we did our dance, we scattered leaves, we fluttered off, they ate us up. Roars, applause. Come the finale, we pelted the front row with crackers. They went mad. We’d done what we were born to do and, what was more, we’d do it again tomorrow.

  Grandma had brought Our Cyn, of course, but, sharing our little triumph, bearing a hatbox full of Fortnum’s chocs and bronzed under his freckles by hotter suns than ours . . . our prodigal uncle made his way between the frilly chorus with arms held wide: ‘My clever ones!’

  Our cup was full to overflowing; he had come home in time to witness our début.

  We loved it all, showing off, fancy dress, Leichner’s No. 7. We’d take great gulps of the stale air as soon as we got inside the theatre to set us up for the night. Give me that incomparable old fug of oranges, Jeyes Fluid, humanity, gas . . . I’d rather dab it behind my ears than Mitsouko, even. That moment when the band in the pit tuned up . . . We were wet for it, I tell you! Such a rush of blood to our vitals when we started to dance!

  We loved it so much we could scarcely believe it when they gave us our pay packets but Grandma banked the cash, said, the sooner we started earning, the better, although Perry’s cheque came regular as clockwork and now he had come home again, his presents fell like rain. But Grandma said, you never can tell. Hope for the best, expect the worst, she said.

  Impossible to comprehend as it might seem at that time to his bedazzled nieces, our Uncle Perry did possess a fault. One single fault. It was his boredom threshold. Our little Tiff at three years old had more capacity for continuous effort than Perry. For him, life had to be a continuous succession of small treats or else he couldn’t see the point.

  One August bank holiday, we would have just turned thirteen, he roared up in a cab. Big hugs. He pinched our cheeks. ‘You look pe
aky, girlies! Can’t have that.’ He piled us all in the back of the cab, Nora, me, Grandma, not forgetting Our Cyn (‘Oh, Mr Hazard!’) along with a ruddy great hamper from Jackson’s, Piccadilly. ‘Dr Brighton is indicated, my man!’ First the cabby gaped; then he beamed. ‘You’re on, guv’nor.’ And off we went.

  There was a linen tablecloth to spread out on the beach over the shingle and Perry and the cabby, bosom chums, by now, toddled off arm in arm to pick up some bubbly while we put out the ham and chicken and cut up the loaf and opened the can of foie gras, nothing but the best when Uncle Perry stood the treat. All the punters stared, I can tell you – three skinny girls and a fat lady in a spotted veil, Perry with his shock of bright red hair and his stevedore’s shoulders and his big, fat smile, and the cabby in the leather jacket. Grandma filled the glasses, gave her toast: ‘Champagne to all here, real pain to the other bastards.’ Perry picked hard-boiled eggs out of our noses and gave us our coffee piping hot poured from the neb of the cabby’s cap.

  When we’d all done eating, Perry took hold of the two corners of one end of the cloth and – whoosh! the fine china, the knives and forks (good, heavy silverware, nothing mean), the bones, the crusts, the empties, vanished clean away. He said he’d sent them back to the shop. How did he do it? Search me. Our Uncle Perry knew a trick or two. Bloody marvellous conjurer. Should have set up professionally. Half the beach broke into spontaneous applause and, much encouraged, Perry said: anybody got a saw? If so, he’d saw Grapdma in half. Not on your life, she said, God knows what might come out. She’d tucked up her skirts, shown off her big, red bloomers, had her little paddle. She took a crème de menthe frappé, to settle her digestion, she belched, she nodded off. Our Cyn and the cabby were deep in conversation so the rest of us set off for a walk along the pier.

  Perry was the size of a polar bear, bless him, in his vanilla tussore suit and the straw boater with the red and black ribbon and white shirt with a red stripe, stiff collar, red tie. He was huge but dapper. The citric brisk smell of his cologne. Later on, during the war, dragging myself up from my slumbers in the blackout, I got a big whiff of it, Trumper’s Essence of Lime. I thought: I must have had it off with Peregrine!!! Dread and delight coursed through my veins; I thought, what have I done . . . But when I switched the light on, it turned out to be not Perry at all, but that Free Pole.

  Peregrine in his ice-cream suit with a girl on either arm, neither of us anything special on our own – skinny things with mouse-brown bobs – but, put us together, we turned heads. Past the donkey rides and the hokey-pokey man and all the minarets, turrets and trellises of Brighton Pavilion, which always reminds me of our Grandma, somehow, although she tended towards the subfusc, she was like the Brighton Pavilion in blackout. Highly unlikely the Pavilion looked, too, that afternoon. Such a lovely day. The shiny, frilly waves; cackling of the seagulls; laughter of little children; plashing of water. And he’d let us have a glass of bubbly, each, at lunch. Everything conspired to make us happy.

  I’ve been happy before and I’ve been happy after, but, swinging along the front at Brighton with Nora and our Uncle Perry, not a care in the world, it was the first time I was old enough and wise enough and knew my way about my own feelings well enough, to put it into words: ‘Goodness! I’m happy!’ When I think of happiness, I always think of Brighton, and of that August bank holiday when I was thirteen, because we did the heights and depths, that day. How frail a thing your happiness can be! We went from the ridiculous to the sublime, and broke our hearts, as well.

  ‘Why are they called Pierrots?’ asked Nora outside the Pier Pavilion.

  ‘Because they do their stuff on piers.’

  I love the artificial dark of the matinée, the same, exciting dark you get when you draw the curtains after lunch to go to bed. The sea was swishing back and forth beneath the Pier Pavilion and it was moist and warm, inside, and full of holiday scents of Evening in Paris and Ashes of Violets mixed with dry fish, that is, fried, from outside, and wet fish, that is, dead, from down below, and hot tin, from the roof, and armpits. Nobody there to take a ticket; the first half of the show was nearly over so we sneaked in at the back.

  The Pierrots were standing around in their white frills, looking spare, and there was a comic up on stage halfway through his act. He’d got on a pair of plus-fours, huge things, big as a couple of hot-air balloons, in the kind of pink Grandma called ‘fraizy crazy’ (crushed strawberry, to you; work it out for yourself) – shiny pink satin plus-fours tucked into mauve golfing socks with pink clocks plus a pair of pink suede brogues with big, mauve, flapping tongues hanging out. He’d got a golf club in his hand, to go with his outfit, and he made lewd gestures with it; mothers covered their children’s eyes.

  I’d never heard of him in those days, though he made a big name for himself later on, but when he started out, you’d have thought it was going to be a name you couldn’t print in a family newspaper. He called himself . . . he called himself . . . I’ll remember it in a minute. He had a catch phrase, ‘Nothing queer about our George.’ He popped up again in Hollywood, in The Dream, with us, what a surprise; he played, of course he would, what else, Bottom.

  Gorgeous George. He billed himself as Gorgeous George.

  ‘. . . and this boy’s thoughts turned lightly to’ – big poke in the air with the golf club – ‘so he says to his dad, “I want to get married to the girl next door, Dad.”

  ‘“Ho, hum,” says his dad. “I’ve got news for you, son. When I was your age, I used to get me leg over –”’

  Roars, shrieks, hoots; but all so much titillation without any substance, I tell you, because he gave them a shocked look, pursed his lips together, shook his golf club in reproof.

  ‘Filthy minds, some of you have,’ he grieved in parenthesis. Renewed hoots and shrieks.

  ‘What I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted . . .’

  That was his other catch phrase.

  ‘. . . was, I used to get me leg over –’

  Mothers covered their children’s ears.

  ‘– I used to get me leg over the garden wall –’

  He made a fierce lunge in the air with his golf club and looked around, working his eyebrows as if to defy misinterpretation.

  ‘. . . and, cut a long story short, you can’t marry the girl next door, son, on account of she’s your sister.’

  The air turned blue. Mothers forced reluctant children outside, bribing with ice-cream.

  ‘So this boy buys a bike’ – he straddled his golf club, mimicked pedalling, renewed roaring – ‘and pedals off. Pedals, I said, Missus; what d’you think I said? He pedals off to Hove.’

  Wonderful diction. Grandma herself couldn’t have done more with that long ‘O’.

  ‘He comes back, he says to his father: “I’ve met this nayce girl from Hove, Dad.” “Hove?” says Dad. “Sorry to say, son, I frequently hove to in Hove when I was your age and –”’

  He halted, working his eyebrows, manipulating his golf club. Say no more. They laughed until they cried.

  ‘This poor boy, he buys himself a day return, he goes up to Victoria, he meets a girl under the clock. Clock, I said, Missus. But his father says: “We had trains in my young day, son . . .”’

  Appreciative gurgles.

  ‘The boy goes into the kitchen for a cup of tea. Big sigh. His mum says: “You’ve got a face as long as a –”’

  Eyebrows. Golf club. Roars.

  ‘What I was going to say, before I was so rudely interrupted, was . . . as long as a fiddle!’

  They pounded the floorboards with their feet.

  ‘“Looks like I’ll never get married, Mum.” “Why’s that, son?” He told her all about it, she says: “You just go ahead and marry who you like, son –”’

  Split-second timing. That pause. Perfect.

  ‘’E’s not your father!’

  They stamped and pounded so you would have thought the floor was going to give way. Perry gazed on, amazed. ‘Well, God b
less the bloody British,’ he said. ‘I never thought they had it in them.’

  When the audience quieted down, they put a pink filter on the spot so Gorgeous George flushed all over. He put on a lugubrious look and sucked in his cheeks. It was time for his tenor number. The lady accompanist, one of Mrs Worthington’s ilk, gave the piano a good thump. George clasped his hands together on his club, adopted a reverential air, and, would you believe it, there, in his pink suit in the pink spot, on the end of Brighton Pier, on August bank bloody holiday, he gave out with ‘Rose of England’.

  Rose of England, breathing England’s air,

  Flower of majesty beyond compare . . .

  The Pierrots, all turned pink themselves, formed groups reminiscent of posies and nosegays and sank to their knees for the throbbing finale. You couldn’t get away with that sort of thing, these days, not unless it was what they call ‘camp’. Then George held up his hand to quell the applause and, stepping forward, announced in a voice heavy with emotion:

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls . . . long live the King!’

  The lady accompanist struck up ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in spite of a couple of bum notes in the bass and George shouldered his golf club as if it were a rifle and commenced to march round and round the stage in military fashion, the mauve tongues of his suede brogues lolling voluptuously half a beat behind him.

  Left, right, halt.

  He salutes the audience under the spot, which is now bright white again, the limelight falling on his shoulders like dandruff. The lady accompanist simulates a drumroll, to the best of her ability. Off comes his satin cap.

  Nora and I looked at one another, puzzled. What on earth was going on?

  Another drumroll.

  Off comes his rose-pink jacket.

  Odder and odder.

  And it turned out that George himself, in himself, in his skin, is the prime spectacle on offer, this afternoon.

  For George was not a comic at all but an enormous statement.