The Fun Factory Page 22

  We were last on the bill, so the audience were already on the loose. I peeked out into the corridor to see if the coast was clear.

  “Ho! You there! Dandoe!” a voice rang out.

  “Mr Luscombe, is it not?” I said, pulling the door closed behind me as I stepped out. “From the old college? What a surprise!”

  Luscombe major was puce with indignation – or perhaps his stiff white collar was too tight.

  “I mean to take my brother with me back to London at once. Where is he?”

  “Your brother?” I said, scratching my head (as people do when puzzled). “Whatever makes you think he might be here, of all places?”

  “A letter, damn your cheek! He wrote to our mother, and the envelope was franked in this God-forsaken town! I knew I’d find him here, amongst you low-lifes and vagabonds! And I have!”

  With that he shoved past me into the dressing room. I peered over his shoulder, and saw only the innocent faces of Mike, Charlie, Fred Spiksley … and a wicker costume hamper which Charlie Athersmith was sitting on, lighting up a pipe.

  “Mr Luscombe?” I said. “A thought occurs. Would you follow me this way?”

  I led him to the stairs which led up to the stage. We had to pause there to allow a seemingly endless procession of semi-clad chorus girls to pass by, which discomfited the elder Luscombe no end.

  “You see, your brother and I were friendly, as I’m sure you know, and so when I painted this…” – we stepped out onto the stage behind the fire curtain, where the Football Match backdrop was still hanging in plain view – “I took the liberty of using his likeness. Here, you see, and here, and again here…”

  “No, no, no, no, no…” Luscombe’s brother said, pacing in front of the cloth, and poking at it with a suspicious finger. “I saw him, I saw him speak!”

  I slipped around behind and stuck my face through one of the hidden slits in the design. “No, sir, I’m afraid not. It was an optical illusion, d’you see?”

  “What the…?”

  I quickly moved to another position and popped my face through there. “It’s very convincing, do you not agree?”

  Luscombe major blustered. “It can’t be … I mean to say, I saw him. I saw Ralph … didn’t I…?”

  He came with me, as meek as a little lamb, down to the stage door and out into the open air. A little cloud of chorus girls in feathered headdresses bustled by us, and he averted his eyes until they were past and twittering along the alleyway towards the front of house. A fellow with a ginger beard followed close behind, clutching a carpet bag, excusing himself gruffly as he squeezed through.

  “But … the letter?” Luscombe senior ventured, no longer sure of his ground.

  “I’m sure there will be a perfectly reasonable explanation when you see him,” I said. “Do give him my regards, won’t you?”

  In the distance ahead of him the feathered headdresses all turned right and out of sight. Something caught in the breeze swirled around Luscombe the elder’s distracted feet as he walked away, and then was whisked up the alleyway towards me, coming to rest in a puddle a yard or so away.

  It was a ginger beard.

  Every time we brought the Football Match to a new town, I would be sure to attend the band call on the Monday. My intention, of course, was to run my eye over the other acts on the bill and see if Tilly might somehow be amongst them.

  Has anybody here seen Tilly? T-I-double L-Y?

  It was not as far-fetched a hope as it might sound, as the music hall kaleidoscope would spin and change the multi-coloured view every week, and coincidences of that kind would often occur. No such luck, though.

  I did see one familiar face, though, the week we were at the Palace in Leicester. There was a solo act, tucked away in a graveyard slot, right after the interval while people were still finding their seats, who was billed, rather endearingly, as ‘He of the Funny Ways’, and who should it be but Stan Jefferson?

  We greeted one another like old pals, and sat together in the stalls to catch up.

  “Well, I left the old man, finally,” Stan explained cheerfully.

  “How did he take it?”

  Stan grinned. “Ah, not well, actually. The phrase ‘Never darken my doorstep again!’ was bandied about pretty freely. He’ll get over it. But what about you? And what about the lovely Mrs Dandoe? Is she with you?”

  “Not this time,” I said.

  “Shame. I suppose there wasn’t a part for her in a sketch about football,” Stan said.

  ‘He of the Funny Ways’ had very funny ways indeed, to my way of thinking. That evening Charlie and I watched Stan from the wings, and he had a struggle at first just getting the audience’s attention after they’d been to the bar at the interval. He did it, though, and by the end of his five minutes every night that week the crowd were laughing again and ready to enjoy the rest of the turns.

  “It’s pretty simple stuff, though, isn’t it?” Charlie sniffed, and it was, he was right, but Stan was able to win an audience round with … well, with his funny ways. I didn’t believe Charlie when he tried to put Stan’s act down. He was cleverer than that. He saw another potential rival, that’s what he saw.

  On the last night, in the bar, we wished one another luck.

  “What’s next?” I asked Stan. He shrugged.

  I turned to Charlie.

  “Stan would do well with Karno, don’t you think?”

  Stan brightened, but Charlie sucked air in through his teeth, doubtful, discouraging.

  “It’s not as if we could actually do anything, though, is it? The Guv’nor likes to dig up his uncut gems for himself. He doesn’t really go to the smaller houses, and he doesn’t like being pushed into things – remember Warrington?

  I supposed he had a point, but Stan’s chin had just about hit the floor. I decided to drop the subject. “It was just a thought,” I said.

  “Yes, well, maybe one day, like,” Stan said, but that day seemed a long way distant.

  It was the autumn of that year, 1909, a sunny afternoon, and a little group of us were standing out in front of the Bells’ house. Clara was there, and Edie, clutching her dolly, the ubiquitous Miss Churchhouse, as usual. Charley Bell crouched down, poking away at a flower bed with a trowel. Mrs Karno was ruffling the hair of her little lad Leslie, and quizzing me for gossip about the Guv’nor and his empire. Suddenly I realised that Clara and Edith Karno were no longer listening to me, but were looking at something behind me, in the street. Their faces had hardened, and Charley Bell was slowly rising to his feet.

  I turned and there was a brougham gliding slowly past, the driver holding the grey horse at a gentle trotting pace. If I hadn’t been able to see the passengers I would have recognised it easily enough, as it was the Guv’nor’s pride and joy, painted maroon, with gleaming brass fittings, with “Fred Karno’s Comics” painted boldly on the door. Inside I could see Karno and Maria, the woman he’d introduced to me as his wife, chatting away, laughing, affecting not to notice whose houses they were passing.

  “Oh, my dear,” Clara sighed. There was a resignation in her voice that told me this wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened.

  “It’s quite all right,” the real Mrs Karno replied stoically.

  “Coming back,” Charley Bell muttered, and sure enough, the maroon brougham had executed a languid turn at the far end of the road and was about to trot past again.

  “Well, then,” Edith said. “Let’s give them something to laugh at, shall we?”

  She reached over and grasped Edie’s dolly, cradled it in her arms and began to coo over it as though it were a real baby. Charley and Clara joined in, and Edie and Leslie too, thinking this was a fine game.

  I watched as Karno’s brougham glided past again, with the Guv’nor and his mistress themselves playing at happy families, and saw the moment Karno spotted that his wife was nursing a baby. His jaw dropped, and, as the carriage pulled away, I could see him leaning out to get a better view, almost braining h
imself on a lamp post as he disappeared around the corner.

  The next time I saw Karno was at the Fun Factory. He called me into his office, and I sat across the desk from him as he tapped a pencil on his fingers. A little cough, and then he smiled, as if not quite knowing how to begin. My first thought was that Syd had finally told him about the moral turpitude thing and I was going to be sacked.

  “So,” he said eventually. “How did you and young Chaplin take to Mister Harry Weldon?”

  “Charlie said he thought it was a punishment,” I said.

  Karno laughed. “So it was, so it was,” he chuckled. “But not for you, for Harry Weldon. He was throwing his weight around, so I thought I’d send him a couple of arrogant young upstarts to shake him up a bit. And you certainly did that, by all accounts.”

  He smiled, looked down at his hands.

  “You’re living with the Bells, then?”

  “When I’m in town.”

  “So you’ll have realised that … ahem … that your next-door neighbour is, or was rather, my wife?”

  I was on my guard, now. “Yes,” I said.

  “Does she…? Erm, that is to say, have you had the chance to speak with her?”

  “I have,” I said. “She often asks about the various goings-on.”

  Karno’s eyes narrowed.

  “The shows, I mean, she’s always very interested in what shows I have done, and all your many successes.”

  “Quite so.” Karno tapped a pencil against his teeth.

  “And you know that t’ child who lives there with her is my son?”

  “Leslie? Yes, he’s a grand little chap.”

  “You don’t think him too skinny?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “I am concerned that she doesn’t feed him well.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Don’t worry about that, he eats like a horse, he just runs it off, you know.”

  “You would tell me if you thought he was badly treated?”

  “He is not, I assure you, Guv’nor.”

  “Right.” Karno coughed again, and leaned forward onto the desk. “Now listen to me. What I have to ask you about is rather a delicate matter, and you don’t really need to know the ins and outs of it all, but I happened to see, as I was passing t’other day, just in the area, you understand, I happened to see … a certain … babe-in-arms.”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t give me that,” he snapped. “I need to know who is t’ father of that infant and I need to know it this minute.”

  “The father?” I said, quite taken aback.

  “Is it Bell? Is it?”

  “No…”

  “Is it you, you randy little sod? Because if it is…”

  “No, no!” I cried out, alarmed at the turn things were taking. “It was just a doll, that’s all!”

  “A doll?”

  “A child’s toy. Your wife bought it for Edie, the Bells’ daughter. It’s very lifelike. It’s a toy!” There was an awkward pause, and then he smiled again. It seemed to cost him a little effort, but he was trying to signal a return to the jollier mood of a few moments earlier.

  “Well!” he said. “Ha ha! Enough of all that. I have some news for you. I need to send a Mumming Birds company to Paris for a month. You can go and give that very very fine Magician I witnessed in Warrington, and you can take young Chaplin along, as he is so desperately keen to play the drunk. Paris, eh? The Folies Bergère! How about that!”

  “Thank you very much, Guv’nor,” I said, relieved.

  “Now then. Is there anything else I can do for you, young Dandoe?”

  “Anything you can do for me?”

  “Yes. Is there anything else that I…” – he patted himself on the waistcoat – “can do for you?” – and offered both hands across the desk to me, palms up. Ordinarily I would just have been pleased to be on my way, but he seemed keen to make amends for his earlier sharpness, so I felt momentarily emboldened.

  “Well,” I said. “I saw someone who would be a fine addition to the company. He was working as a solo, but I’ve seen him in a skit as well. His name is Stan Jefferson.”

  Karno looked curious, alert. “Jefferson? Any relation to ‘A.J.’ Jefferson? Calls himself the ‘Karno of the North’?”

  “His son,” I admitted. “You remember when we first met in Cambridge, and you said I had ‘it’?” Karno nodded. “Well, I’m pretty sure Stan has ‘it’ too.”

  “I see…” the Guv’nor mused, more to himself than to me. “That’d be one in the eye for old A.J., and no mistake… Ha! His own son…!”

  I edged towards the door.

  “I’m obliged to you.” Karno sprang to his feet to usher me out. “See, this is good, isn’t it, Arthur? I help you, you help me. That is how things ought to be, don’t you agree?” He caught himself there, speaking in rhyme, and smiled broadly. “There’s an idea for a song, half written already, ha ha! Enjoy yourself in gay Paree, lad, an’ I’ll see you in a month!”

  22

  OUI! TRAY BONG!

  WE left for Paris on a Sunday morning. Charlie did his usual trick of almost missing the boat train, and it was only when we got to Dover that we realised he had travelled down in the guard’s van as per usual.

  Charlie had been to call on Hetty Kelly to tell her that he was going to Paris, only to be told by her sister that Hetty herself was there already with the Bert Coutts Yankee Doodle Dancers, so he was aflame with romantic imaginings. He didn’t keep them to himself, either, while the rest of us tried to while away the crossing playing cards.

  “The most romantic city in the world!” he kept sighing. “It can hardly fail.”

  The late autumn weather was filthy, with heavy rain keeping everyone below decks, and our first view of the continent was through a foggy curtain of water. The outlook was hardly more thrilling on the train journey from Calais, as the countryside was flat and uninteresting, and the rain grimly persistent. Charlie’s excited chatter continued unaffected, however, and to tell the truth as we approached Paris I began to feel a little thrill myself. We saw a golden luminescence lighting the underside of the rain clouds in the distance, and Charlie pressed his nose against the window.

  “Is that it, do you think?” he asked. “There! There! Is it?”

  “Oui, oui, c’est Paris,” said a French gentleman sitting nearby without looking up from his newspaper, using the tone of voice a parent might use to a child he has already told several times to sit still and be quiet.

  “Oui! Tray bong!” Charlie exclaimed. When Ernie and I wrinkled our noses in puzzlement, he launched into a song, inviting us to join in as if we must know it:

  Hip, hooray! Let’s be gay!

  Boom diddy ay! Ta-ra-ra!

  To each little Frenchy dove,

  Standing drinks and making love,

  We fairly mashed the ladies with our Oui! Tray bong!

  “Sit down, you idiot,” I said. “Before you destroy the entente cordiale completely.”

  On the short drive from the Gare du Nord to the small hotel where we were to stay, on the Rue Geoffroy-Marie, Charlie was once again a bundle of energy.

  “Look!” he cried, pointing at some café or building. “Just like a Pissarro. I’m getting out and walking…”

  “Just wait, can’t you?” I said. “If you start walking you won’t know where the place is.”

  The place, when we got to it, was enough to dampen even Charlie’s enthusiasm; small rooms, with freezing-cold stone floors, like cells in a monastery. The Bastille, Charlie called it, and it was a great incentive to get out and about.

  Charlie was quickly dressed up to the nines and knocking impatiently on my door. I myself only ever had the capacity to dress up to the sevens, maybe seven and a halfs at the outside, but enough to pass muster. The two of us stepped out and strolled over to the Folies Bergère, where we were to catch the Sunday night performance before starting in ourselves on the Monday.

  And it was quite an eye-opener, I can tell yo
u, after the months of traipsing around the ale-drenched halls of Northern England, to set foot in the thick-carpeted foyer of the Folies Bergère. You never saw such a glamorous place in all your life. An orchestra played as gorgeous ladies checked their wraps and fur coats, baring their creamy white shoulders. Huge mirrors and vast chandeliers made the room twinkle, and it seemed somehow that we had arrived at the very centre of the whole world. We climbed a plush staircase to the promenade of the dress circle, where bejewelled Indian princes in their pink and blue turbans, and military officers of all nationalities, it seemed, French, Turkish, British, in their peacock uniforms and plumed helmets, had congregated to watch the world go by. And you could get good old British Bass Ale there too. It was like a vision of Heaven.

  We ventured into the theatre to get a flavour of the entertainment, which was as different from a night at an English music hall as champagne is to ale (although, as I say, you could get ale). Women, women, dancing girls, flesh, quivering, wobbling, girls, moving or in teasing tableaux as far as the eye could see.

  In one number the dancing girls were wearing flesh-coloured body stockings which left nothing to the imagination, except, obviously, what they looked like without the flesh-coloured body stockings on. In another an alluring array of female pulchritude twinkled and glittered behind giant feather fans on a huge glass and gilt staircase.

  In between these fleshy parades there were turns, musical and comical. I felt a little sorry for one act in particular, a tall, loose-limbed youth of about my age, who came on to do a few wistful and melodic numbers by himself. A solo male singer stood very little chance of holding the crowd’s attention after dozens of scantily clad girls had just departed the scene, and although he actually had a thoroughly tuneful and agreeable singing voice, the place simply emptied in front of his eyes as he warbled away about this and that, and occasionally the other.

  More successful at holding the audience in their seats was a sketch by the celebrated local comedian Max Linder. He cut a dapper figure in his forlorn pursuit of a lady, with his louche moustache and his sleepy eyes, and although I could not follow the dialogue I picked up enough to be impressed.