Ada Read online

  I don’t know what this caption is on about. I didn’t see a single murderous Afghan in the Himalayas – I don’t know what they’d be doing there. It was too cold for murdering when we went.

  We went everywhere, duckie. As I used to tell all the reporters: Shakespeare said, ‘All the world’s a stage’, but our stage was all the world. Professor Baldwin gave me that line.

  Me, a lassie from Lancashire, dancing for the King of Siam in a special pavilion at his palace that was dripping with electrical chandeliers, painted murals with gold edges all along the walls showing the Siamese elephants trampling away at the Burmese. Tall, decorated ebony screens carved the audience into two sections. On one side of the screens, in came the wee King sporting silk robes, and a drooping moustache on his little, grave face, in the lead of forty of his sons, from the age of three to about fifteen. The others were away at school in England. Once they were seated, servants opened a curtain on the other side, and in trooped about two hundred or so wives. That’s true – they might have been daughters, or chambermaids, but any road he was spoiled for choice. They all wore balloon-sleeved blouses, silk pantaloons like bicycling dress, and a blue sash covered in jewels, each woman with short, crisp, straight black hair.

  We began singing to an ocean of solemn faces, and we all got the flop-sweats. That’s when you’re so nervous you turn into a fountain, Horrie. Like a seltzer syphon squirt down your back. So I took it upon myself to wink at His Majesty during the bells act; he burst out laughing and we were away. After that, whenever he laughed, the other three hundred laughed too. They darkened the pavilion for my Serpentine dance specialty piece, and we had five calcium lights fizzing away with the revolving circles of coloured slides in the beam of the magic lantern. As I twirled and whirled and roiled the yards of white costume in the changing coloured lights, at last I could hear them ooh and ahh. We ended with one light on me, stock still with the Siamese royal ensign flag projected across my middle, a white elephant on a red background. They stood up, crazed with applause.

  For the next week we had the run of the palace grounds and the use of the King’s elephants, which we rode about on the Bangkok streets. Jim used to go first with his pith helmet on, laughing and pointing at everything. He never let go of that pith helmet after that. Look, he’s still got hold of that helmet in India, in this photograph.

  That’s Jim in the middle, leaning on the artillery cartwheel, looking quite in charge as usual. Tents, that’s what we slept in for half that trip, camping along the way. Mosquito nets and quinine and gin, and plenty of brown chaps to carry everything. Porter wallahs, and tea-wallahs and pigeon-chasing wallahs and ladies in screaming pink and yellow sarees making curries in the background. Imagine that. The likes of us having servants.

  Jim was in his element. He was my adopted brother, and from the time I was fourteen years old he was my boss, too. He ran the show: arranged the engagement, oversaw the baggage, employed the stage technicians and magic lantern operators, settled the accommodations, played the banjo and the bones, and carried the cash and the cosh.

  To this day, I’ve never been paid into my own hand. All the takings and contract money for the Ada Delroy Company went to Jim, of course. Sometimes we would see through an open door into a theatre manager’s office, and see the lovely, rustly pounds being counted over. Managers or artists were always called in one by one to be paid and thanked. Whichever town he’s in, our mate Harry who runs the Tivoli theatre circuit always sits behind a desk in the theatre office and pays the artists himself, as a sign of respect.

  Jim would bounce out, the pounds already in his inside pocket. If we were riding high he would hand me two shillings, and his daughters Cissie and Lizzie a sixpence each, and say: ‘Off you go, girls, for a pot of tea and a nice new ribbon.’ It was years later somebody told me that Professor Baldwin was paying more for my dances than Jim or Alice’s acts combined. We travelled with Professor Baldwin for years and made him rich. But then, when you’re a lady artiste you know you’ll always be paid less than the man even if it’s a double act. And you can’t be on your own without a manager – no theatre manager would deal directly with a woman.

  Ah, you’ve got a good eye, Horrie. You’ve your finger on the lady with the hundred-mile stare. And half a pound of black feathers on her head, in her best coat with a smart tartan lining and a face like a dawn frost. That’s Jim’s wife, my sister-in-law Alice, now gone to glory these last four years, which is why I find myself in possession of her husband. She’s making the Alice face in this picture. Peel a boiled egg and you’ll find precisely the same emotion displayed on it, dearie-oh.

  In every photo we have of Alice her mouth goes across like an ocean horizon, and she looks poised to go after the photographer with a stick. Alice would never be a true actress – imagine an actress who doesn’t move her face – but was perfectly handy as a forbidding old frumpty in a pantomime burlesque show. She did what she needed to and got off, bless her. That’s why I always played Jim’s sweetheart, though I’m twenty years younger than him, while Alice, the true wife at ten years his junior, played the ancient battle-axe for laughs. Her deadface comedy had them roaring, though she was never applauded for the much more difficult things she did, like having eight babies in a row and still performing the skipping act.

  Three of Alice’s babies are in this picture: Cissie in the ridiculous bonnet, little Thomas on his behind, and Lizzie, on the left in front – already a young woman of twenty-four or so in the pince-nez, which used to put an angry red mark on the top of her dear little nose. I remember that duck-handled parasol.

  That chap standing up on the left and looking off into the distance like a loon – that’s Ed Ford, the facial comedian. He could laugh on one side of his face and cry on the other. Never looked at a camera lens. He thought it made him look thoughtful, which it doesn’t. He looks quietly bonkers. I don’t know who the British Indian soldier is, on top, who looks like he’s got a tent pole up his jacksie, pardon my French.

  Dear old Maud Lita’s there in her best hat; she was the soprano. Not just a whooperupper either; she had a lovely voice, and she let me borrow her hats. And then me, and what have I come as? Dressed in a velvet tam-o’-shanter, a scalloped lace dickie, a fur collar and holding a parrot. Butter wouldn’t melt. I was teaching that parrot to say ‘Madam Marzella, you old trout!’

  This picture makes me proud. A whole theatrical company under my name. Proper professionals going round and round the world making people happy everywhere we went.

  You seem powerfully interested in our history, Horace. Do you want to be in the theatre yourself? I can see why. You’ve visions of excitement and endless troupes of dancing girls and nice cigars and silk cravats, I suppose. I don’t want to ruin your idyll without cause, so stand up, and let me have a look at you.

  Hmm. A wiry little chap, plain brown eyes, but with rather a determined chin. Could you be an acrobat, or an equilibrist? Got a head for heights? Young people think the theatre business is full of change and excitement – one day you’re making a family of marionettes dance, the next you’re helping a girl in spangled fleshings hurl herself in the middle of a great spider web spanning the stage. But it’s really about discipline and endurance. You do the same act for years – decades, Horrie. I did some acts longer than you’ve been alive. Even the pauses are in the same spot. And as for the travel, you can do sightseeing out of a tiny jolting window from which you can just see the same tree repeated a thousand times. It doesn’t matter to you if you’re in Toowoomba or Leeds or Calcutta, you still have to get up at first lift of sparrow’s eyelid and onto the first train. And on the way you learn the lines for a new farce, or help an understudy learn responses for the clairvoyant act.

  Could you practise several hours a day and perform and travel all the rest? Can you recite a poem from memory with feeling instead of a frown? Turn your face to the window light while I see if you’ve got a twinkle in your eye.

  That’s the thing about
the stage – brio will get you almost everywhere. In the halls you didn’t have to be beautiful or talented, though it gives you a leaping leg up if you is. You can get away with what the papers called a ‘pleasant voice’ – but to have them roar for encores, you need a bit of zippy-zappy. You could dress as a girl and do a silly maid, or be a flirty masher boy with more confidence than he had a right to, or a tramp act, but you need the House on your side.

  You need the audience feeling they’re in it with you – tip ’em the wink, have ’em cheering when you get up after you’ve been flattened. It’s genuine pluck you need. It’s harder than it sounds, Horrie. It takes years of practice and learning your lines and doing it every night to see where and when the laughs come. Nip next door and get a couple of lemons off their tree – they won’t be home – and try a juggle. Show us your heels then, can you try an eccentric dance? Oh dear. I don’t think it’s in your blood, Horrie. Still, with practice we might be able to make something of you. If I’m around long enough.

  To be top drawer on the stage you need élan, which is Continental for front. And the wit to keep getting up in front of a shrieking drunk crowd and demand their attention. You need brains, instinct and timing. To make your fortune you still have to work like billyo but you have to have something mysterious that you can’t learn, that comes natural to you.

  What I had, you can see from my bulging old album, was vim to the brim, as my niece Cissie used to say. Reliably encored three to five times a night. We ran the first-ranked show in North England for a couple of years, and toured the world. But in the end it wasn’t enough. When the bust came, we couldn’t stay afloat.

  If you’re still keen, I could teach you how to get along in a half-hour farce, Horrie. We played ’em as broad as the moors, always after intermission. They were full of hopeless lovers and waspchewing mother-in-laws and long-legged villains and pompous poop-deckers and long-lost heirs who were mysteriously adopted – don’t look so appalled. What I’d give for somebody to dash in here this instant, do a standing high-kick and pretend to be Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines in a frock.

  What Jim taught me, and Harry Rickards and Professor Baldwin sharpened up in me, is how to play BIG. On the musichall stage you need to play to the back seats of the gallery, up on the top tier. They have to see what’s going on as well as the ones in the front rows of the stalls. So you’ve got to put extra vowels in a drawl, fling your arms about, convulse violently, bend your knees and stick your behind out to walk across the stage, twirl a cane, waggle a cigar, doff a cap with you arm at full stretch, throw a leg. Costumes have dots the size of dinner plates, stripes as wide as your leg, pom-poms the size of oranges. I tell you what will get you a big laugh: wheel a pram onstage and have a grown man pop his head out. Guaranteed.

  If you’re playing a drunk, you can’t do it just a little unsteady – you have to be brandy-walloped, walk almost horizontally, slur your words, shout, punch at shadows, fall over and roll back up in one move, and wrap yourself around a lamp-post. If you’re ever on the stage, Horrie, and you get biffed on the snoot, here’s what to do: stagger backwards, throw in a somersault and waggle your ankles in the air as you lie on your back. And then bounce up and shape up to fight in the wrong direction. Another surefire crowd-tickler.

  Don’t bother coming out of the dressing-room if you can’t tell the audience in an instant that you’re cunning (waggle eyebrows, rub hands); happy-go-lucky (loosen knees, grin showing back molars); Scottish (red wig, tartan, mad brogue); or descended from Mother Africa (burnt cork on face, stripey trousers, banjo in hand). For singing, I had a yellow wig for innocence, and one they called ‘bushfire blonde’ – henna red – to show spirit.

  With that lesson you can go into vaudeville tomorrow, Horace. I shall pop up to the gallery and hurl half a cabbage at you, for encouragement. Well, I would if I could.

  I miss the stage, you know. It’s awful quiet here.

  I’ll tell you what I loved about being a theatrical, Horace. You feel special. You feel part of something exciting, full of camaraderie, a sisterhood and brotherhood with the most interesting people in a room. You’re a custodian of magic, a purveyor of glamour, a repository of mystery. You’re someone, or at least part of something, that people will pay to see. You’re in the gang as sure as if you were a larrikiness in a mob on a street corner, or a soldier in a uniform. You’re always the celebrities in town. I’m sure even now if I were down to selling toffee at intermission at the circus I would feel at home. Most show people – not Marzella, of course – take you as you come. Nobody asks to see your marriage certificate or checks what name you went under in 1881. You’re in the company of your colleagues, and if they’re as eccentric as a badger on stilts or they don’t belong anywhere else, you make room for them at the piano, no questions asked.

  But, no, it’s not a life for you, dearie-oh. Your mother, I’m sure, is a reliable provider of pudding and a stranger to the bottle? And I bet your Da is a professional? A doctor, there you are then. What do you mean you don’t belong? I doubt you’re adopted – you’re not the lead in a dramatic panto, you know. You might say your life’s been dull, Horace, but I’m sure you don’t want to be ungrateful, and here’s something to ponder. If you were brought up in the theatre you wouldn’t have a home and the same bed to grow up in and dinner always on the table.

  You look like you’ve still got a question or two for me, but I regret to inform you that the show’s over for this evening. Playing it big is harder than it looks, otherwise I’d still be on the stage. A busy young man like you has myriad calls on his time, but you might come back tomorrow, mightn’t you, to hear the next instalment of my marvellous adventures? How we conquered the world, how we fell off our pedestal, and a few mysterious secrets even Madam Marzella doesn’t know.

  I find I can’t get up. You can float out the front door on your own, can’t you? Until tomorrow, then.

  I’m glad you’ve come back, Horrie, and not just because you’ve brought Chelsea buns with crystallised ginger in them. I’m feeling quite fizzy this morning, and you have to make the most of those days, I find. I might tempt you into a singalong before you go. Jim’s out at the Tivoli Theatre – he’s stage manager there, did I tell you? And Lizzie’s off instructing awful children who can’t tell a tuba from a tuna-fish. So I’ve time to tell you some stories.

  How about the one when I winked at the King of Siam? Heard it already? Shall I tell you the one about the pendant with a diamond as big as a hen’s egg presented to me by the Marahajah of Hoosibob? As big as a bantam egg, then. A quail’s, perhaps. Or would you rather hear about that benefit performance in New Zealand with seventeen half-dressed acrobats, the Lynch Family Bellringers, and a python doing As You Like It. Or what about the time our coach was galloping along on fire in South Africa, the horse spooked and there’s me smothering the blaze with a blanket? That one, at least, has the novelty of being true.

  We used to wind in the reporters with the whole troupe pitching in flattery and sleight of hand and some lower-leg views, but here I am all alone, with neither conjurings nor whiskey to pour you and loath to give you a swig of my new bottle of morphia, which arrived only a moment before you. Poor little chemist boy had to get down off the horse and bring it in; took a look at me and he was off as if scalded by witches. I’ve had the wind knocked out of me with the cough this morning, I can tell you, so if it’s ankle views you want you’re welcome to lift up a corner of the coverlet that end and take a glance at my shanks. I shan’t be able to stop you. Have it your way. I wouldn’t either. In that case make yourself useful with the kettle, dearie-oh.

  Jimmy’s the stage manager at the Opera House, the Melbourne theatre on Harry Rickards’ Tivoli circuit, did I tell you? Ghastly busy they are. They’ve only just finished not killing Chung Ling Soo nightly in the bullet act, there’s a full music-hall bill running currently, then Mr Houdini arrives next week. Yes, Horrie, that Houdini. Do you think we keep spares in the pantry? It’s one t
hing for me to steal the Serpentine dance repertoire from the Folies Bergère sensation Loïe Fuller in New York. (Did I say that aloud?) It’s another matter entirely to find extra chaps who won’t drown while handcuffed in a milk can. We’re practically related to Mr Houdini; he’s close friends with our Professor Baldwin, with whom we toured the world three times. Mr Houdini is going to jump off a bridge into the Yarra River soon, to create a publicity folderol.

  I don’t think I shall be able to see Mr Houdini performing, either at the Tivoli or hurling himself off parapets. I’m not one for getting out much, now. I’ve shrunk, and my world has shrunk to fit. But Jim brings in any of the newspapers left around the dressing- rooms so I know a bit of the outside world.

  When you’re stuck still somewhere drifting about inside your own head it’s surprising how you come to rely on your ears and nose. There’s only a postage-stamp view from the window here of some verandah ceiling and a bit of sky. I can smell the night jasmine from next door if the breeze is aiming right, and of course there are less welcome whiffs of horse mess and gallons of tomato sauce that the Italians across the road get into bottles for the Eastern Market. They made blackcurrant jam the other day – drove me wild with hunger. My innards burst forth rather a longing gurgle-tune. It was either ‘God Save the Queen’ or ‘Waltz Me Around Again Willie’.

  All summer I was sniffing the smoke and burning eucalyptus before the next day’s paper had news of a bushfire miles away. Believe me, in the theatre you learn to smell a fire quicksticks – and sing out about it – poor old Charley. He’s my nephew – Lizzie’s brother – who was almost done for in the famous blaze at the Oriental Hotel in Wellington. I remember the Theatre Royal in Hobart still had open fires in the dressing-room under the stage, but it’s mostly all made of rock down there with nothing to burn but costumes and people and they’re quite cheap to replace. Charlie is in New Jersey now, in advertising. Pays better than fixing our Magic Lantern, I don’t doubt, and he gets to use his pastels and paints. I’ll tell you more about the Under-the-Table Boys if we have time before you shovel me into a dear little cottage – no, I hadn’t forgotten, and I trust you’re still oiling those cogs for me, Horace.