Ada Read online

  I can hear the tram scree round the corner on the High Street hill from here, and the trains hooting along in the distance, and the shouts of the iceman and the rabbit boys. And as Malvern is a highly respectable sub-division, there is the occasional posh haber-dashery cart. ‘Ribbons, bodice lace, preposterous hats!’

  Stuck here I listen to the birds, but I miss the cheery piping birdsong of England. You used to hear it all day long in Corporation Park of a Sunday in Blackburn. English birds are jolly; Australian birds are furious. Jim calls them peeved poultry: crows with their languid complaining and kookaburras having asterisks (they’re like conniptions, only louder), and friarbirds screeching, and wattlebirds sounding like they’re being strangled on a washboard, and magpies that shout orgle orgle orgle at you all day. And cockatoos. You’ve just calmed your nerves and they let go another shriek like gin-soaked madwomen for no reason at all. And then there’s the bats, with their nasty chirruping squirty noises half the night. The birds I like is a little pair of woodpigeons, they come and strut about that little scrap of lawn out the front of an afternoon and coo properly at each other. It sends me off to sleep, if the medicine doesn’t get in first.

  I hear the gate latch when anyone comes, unless I’m having a drift. Though I don’t get much in the way of visitors. Commonly, it’s Jim scraping his boots on the verandah and clearing his throat before coming in during the darkest hours. He sometimes rolls himself a microbe killer on the verandah and smokes it before coming inside. I see the red dot and smell the baccy and I know he’s home. Sometimes he doesn’t come home, and then it’s the sound of him not coming home wakes me up. He sleeps at the Tivoli, in a fold-out cot in the wings, or if it’s very hot, in the orchestra pit or the cellar: if you don’t finish stage-managing until one o’clock in the morning you miss the last tram, you see.

  Yes, I can hear you coming, too, Horrie – you have a tuneless whistle that makes a cockatoo sound like Nellie Melba. Now don’t take on, it’s not everybody has the makings of a music-hall star. Make yourself comfortable, there. It’s still only the wooden chair, I’m afraid, but I’m expecting an armchair or even a tasselled chaise any day now on loan from Her Majesty’s. I’ve still got contacts, you know. Tip your chair back against the wall and put your feet back up on the trunk: you’ll be all ease.

  Birds aside, I don’t want to be back in the North of England. I haven’t been homesick a day in my life. Like living in a coal hole, it was. A mill town gives you a kick in the behind every day and if you’re the right sort that will drive you all the way to a steamer on the docks going anywhere else. You don’t feel the need so fierce when you grow up in East Melbourne in a sailor suit, Horrie. Well, I didn’t know you were born in Rockhampton, but I’m not surprised your parents took you out of there. I first visited it twenty years ago and it was as rough as a hessian sack with a furious possum in it.

  All of us girls were desperate loom-hands longing to get out and earn our fortune as performers. We wasn’t the first, nor the last, to make a run at the stage from the factories. Jim had a postcard with cartoon photographs on it of seasick mill workers on a boat, saying they’d rather go back to the factories. If brains were currants, they’d be plain teacake, dearie-oh. Being sick is unrefined, but take it from me – it’s a thousand times better than the mills.

  When you’re poor, one of the things you can have for free is yearnings. As a girl I had the yearnings, for years. To have some glamour, to see the world – there’s quite a lot of it to see, you know.

  Jim would shake that postcard at us whenever we was discouraged, and say, ‘Do you want to go back to the roaaarrrring mills, girls?!’ and we’d have to laugh. I wasn’t above having a little grizzle myself, about long hours rehearsing, and bones being shook apart on long-distance coaches. But you have to jam those thoughts up under your hat. Sometimes you’ll hear a soubrette singer or an acrobat complain about their nerves. But even when nerves made you need a bucket in the wings, feeling sick was part of the excitement. You didn’t exactly enjoy the terrors, but it was more interesting than feeling nowt at all and watching your mill-hand future roll out before you like a prison sentence.

  Jim told me early on that nerves was a peculiar thing. They make your innards roil and they make you want to run away before a performance. But if you’re a proper artiste, once you’re out there on a stage you stop wanting to be sick and you feel right at home, like you’re just where you ought to be, having a marvellous time. And then you come off elevated and bubbled-up for hours. Even if you were dread-sick of the song or jokes you were doing, the audience and the applause was new each time. And if you began to lose the fear entire then your performance slipped, and your reputation would slide down after it.

  I’ve been in the theatrical business since I was sixteen years old. It was a childhood like any other, I suppose. At least the other ones I saw in the North of England. I was first growed up in a little stone cottage in Halifax, a mill town among mill towns. I had two parents, one of each sort. Both wax doll makers, doing the works at home.

  I only remember snippets. My da singing and squinting and puffing on a little pipe gripped in his teeth as he painted the faces, pushed the blue glass eyes in from behind, and dotted on the eyebrows, deft and sure. He’d arrange the little horsehair wigs and sew them down to the scalps. Mam had a tin thimble; it glinted away, in and out of her work, angled to catch the candlelight. The tiniest stitches, she did, making little flat calico bodies with plump arms, stuffing them with shatter-ends bought in penny-bags from the mill door.

  What else do I remember? I don’t think these are the questions the Homes for Desiccated Actors wants answering, young Horace, but have it your way. A time the rat man came, with a squirming sack, and I wouldn’t get off the table. A dolly that my mother made me: no wax, all scraps and stuffing with a fancywork face. A little while into my twelfth year both Ma and Da went up to the glories in the same week – of a variety of grip-guts, nobody ever gave it a name. When they came to get Da’s body my mother was still alive, fierce eyes in her wraith-face. She got herself up and leaned on the wall and fixed those eyes on the council inspector and the clergyman who wouldn’t come all the way through the doorway and she made them swear, two hands each on the Bible, they would get me to a distant relative by marriage in Blackburn. She was like specialorder steel to the end, my mother.

  There might even be some of that in me. I used to hide behind my mother’s skirts, or my father’s chair, and then one day there wasn’t anyone left to hide behind. How peculiar to think such a coy lassie as I were could grow herself up and find it in herself to stand centre-stage, hands on hips, and shout at 350 miners that unless they exhibit some manners and shut their traps there would be no show.

  Elizabeth Bell was the distant relative, and Jim’s mother. I was delivered to her on the cats’-meat cart, driven along by a kind man with frayed cuffs, which would have been a lark had I not been afeard and lonely and terrified of losing the coins my mother had watched me sew into my hem. I had a bundle of everything I owned: spare pantaloons and bodice, a nightdress, five precious new candles, and Dolly.

  I was deposited with a whistle at the Bells’ house where I scrambled at my hem and tore out the terrifying shilling and sixpence. I handed them over to Ma Bell on the stoop the instant she opened the door. Perhaps I thought I was buying myself entry. My first box office. ‘Good girl,’ she said, and drew me close with one arm and I wept against her. ‘You shall have some neeps for supper, hen,’ she said, patting my hair. You’d think having so many potatoes in your youth would put you off, but I love a baked one still. The soul who came up with the idea of using a potato to warm your insides was a clever one.

  Blackburn weather was the same grey wet as Halifax. Everything else was the same, too. The same wooden clog soles crunching snow on the cobblestones at shift change, a thousand mill girls looking the same as all women since the babby Jesus arrived, a shawl over their head and clutched at their breast. The same thou
sand mill boys, colliery lads and quarry hands, in the same ragged coats.

  When I arrived I could see that Jim’s parents were already old and gnarled in their joints, coming up towards fifty years apiece. Ma Bell was a mill girl and Pa worked at the foundry with their youngest lad, Big Walter, who was a year or two older than me. That’s where they sweltered and dodged sparks while at home our toes froze and we warmed prised-up cobblestones in the fire, and swaddled them up to keep ourselves warm. You had to be careful not to get them so hot they exploded, which would cause poor Ma to have some asterisks.

  Pa Bell was the black sheep of his family – he’d run away from a Scottish circus to work at the foundry, and he had some metal pincers he used from time to time to get hold of a rotten tooth to pull out of a paying head. A bit of circus still ran through the rest of the Bells – they were bold and brave and musical with it, flash lads with superior patter. They’d hold up a herring and call it a pheasant, and make you believe it. When he was small Pa had danced in his father’s hands, held out to passers-by on Glasgow street corners.

  That side of the Bell family was full of men with pigeon-chests and ropey arms who slung fire in circles, or scrambled up poles and held themselves out sideways into the air. The girls were all wee sprites who leapt between creamy ponies in full canter. Uncle George Bell had a bear he fed on loaves of bread and carrots in a pail of water. The magistrate had him shot for getting out on a Sunday and wandering up Preston High Street. The bear, not George.

  Ma Bell said one way wasn’t better than the other. She said nobody could foresee who was more likely to break down first or end in the workhouse – the weavers or the tumblers. But she was proud of her eldest, Jim. ‘He’s got so much get-up-and-go he got up and went,’ she’d say.

  Jim said that the London workhouses were full of ancient dancing girls who had trouble lifting a bucket, and blind showmen in rags who once had velvet tail coats with diamond buttons. They’d had a run at it, though, and some memories, and that was something. He said that was no sort of failure, it was getting hold of a bit of fun and dash in the middle of your life, even if it was tough at both ends.

  Except for Walter, Ma and Pa’s other sons was all grown and gone by then. Jim was the head of the Bell’s Minstrels troupe. By the time I was sixteen he’d already been a travelling performer for ten years and more with his wife Alice, but they needed some new blood in his troupe and it looked like the blood would be mine. I wasn’t a superior warbler, but almost anyone can learn skipping dancing if they want to enough. There’s a lot about the theatre that can be taught – enough to be going on with.

  So you see, Horrie, my husband Jim used to be my adopted brother at best, or more properly, cousin once removed and stirred about a few times. So we can acquit me of one of the charges, at least.

  Blackburn had remained a bolthole for Jim and Alice because their four small boys lived there, on straw mattresses under the kitchen table with me. In those days my first awoken thought was to check if anyone had piddled on me. I would open one eye and wait to feel whether one or two small souls had settled on me for warmth – or in this case, dampth. I shall draw a veil (or at least half a costume) over that time I woke up with one plait in the chamber-pot.

  Our little house was the same as every other one in the row, and the row behind, and so on up the hill and across. Stained on the inside from coal in the firebox warming the ever-ready black kettle, and stained on the outside from coal in the air. It was two-up, two-down, though one of the ups was a box room with only enough space for Walter to sleep with his legs crooked, and one of the downs was a tiny scullery with space for two coat-hooks and a shelf for potatoes and flour.

  There was nowhere but the stage a man like Jim could wear a dickie and top hat. He had to push the costume in at the pawn shop a few Monday mornings, but after we’d made good he had four jackets with matching kecks. The coats always lasted longer than the trews, all with silk linings and very particular inside pockets sewn by Alice for the takings and the cosh in case he was jumped coming home from the theatre.

  That was just one of the dangers of the theatre. Still, the people feeling sick on the deck in that postcard haven’t a brain between them. Wanting to leave the fearful rocking and the fresh air, and go back to working barefoot in the howling mills? Get away with you. Tending one of 150 clacking, roaring beastie-looms all shuddering at once, shuttles smashing back and forth, threads and cogs with gnashing teeth, stepping around the smallest children darting about underfoot to collect the shoddies, and a thousand iron frames marching out and in, deafening and dangerous? No, thank you.

  Mill air was a moving soup of fibres, with the shafts of light coming weak through the high windows. You had to breathe for hours with your teeth closed against the little worms of cotton. It wasn’t only the heat that made us leave our clogs in a heap at the factory door, it was because of the iron ‘horseshoes’ nailed underneath the wooden sole. A spark from a clog iron struck on the metal edge of a loom machine could start an inferno. Can you imagine, the very air on fire, all that dancing, floating thistle-waft, turned to twisting threads of flame?

  At least in Blackburn the union was strong, so they couldn’t lock us in. But all of us girls had had the nightmare, the bad dream where each of us became a torch, bunching up our burning skirts and writhing and running between the machines for the doors, screaming unheard against the rumbustical roar of the power looms. Rumbustical roar, that’s a good one. Professor Baldwin always said you should use words that begin with the same sound to make people remember them. A fusillade of phantastical phrases. These days I might find the mill as terrifying and sinister as you would, my dearie-oh, but then it was as ordinary as porridge.

  When Jim bought that shipboard postcard, it was about the time of the last Bell family meeting before I left to join the troupe. I can still see the smooth wood of the table in the kitchen, shiny from years of boys’ elbows. I remember the clothes drying on the rack above our heads, wreathed day and night in Pa’s or Jim’s tobacco smoke. Stocking feet and the cuffs of steaming undershirts always reaching down and ruffling our hair as we walked underneath. I remember the first time in Australia I put on a stiff nightdress directly back from the laundress, that had dried in the open. It smelled of fresh air and sunshine instead of coal and Capstan ready-rubbed. I was giddy with it.

  Where was I? The meeting. Jim was already known across the North then as a comical blackface banjo man, and his wife Alice was a clog dancer and skipping specialist with the dignified stage name of Marion Constance. Their eldest, Lizzie, travelled with them. If I were sixteen then, Lizzie would have been six. They was back between engagements to see the Under-the-Table Boys and ask Ma Bell for permission for me to join their troupe.

  I was to be Ada Delroy, so it sounded like I was a thrilling import from France or thereabouts. I’d been born an Elizabeth Alice, if you must know, but the Bells were full up with Alices and Lizzies already so Ada I became. I was to work up some songs and comic turns and do Alice’s clog dance and skipping while she was in her confinements. Not that Alice was confined much, mind, before each babby. It was always up and on the train to the next place and find a midwife woman quicksticks wherever you were, if you could, when the time came.

  Lizzie didn’t take up much room at the kitchen table; she was like a wee mouse. Isn’t it funny that eyeglasses make somebody look more like a mouse even though mice don’t wear spectacles? Her little brothers were under the table already, sent to bed so as the rest of us could fit. James would have been four, so William and Charles each at the upper end and the lower end of three, and the bab – another Walter – just shy of his first year. All too young and too much in the way to go on the road with their parents. Little Walter was probably sucking his thumb and stroking a patch of his mother’s ankle through a hole in her stocking, or sharpening his new tooth on somebody’s clog sole.

  It was a Thursday, I think, because the boys were pink and shiny with dried tears from the
bath, each in turn dipped and sluiced and then, to much shrieking, scrubbed in the tin bath in front of the fire. ‘You’re biling me!’ James junior would shout. The water began clean for Ma Bell and got sootier as everyone else had their turn. ‘Bell soup,’ Ma used to call it.

  The three chairs taken by the proper grown-ups, Lizzie and I sat on the queer bench made of a box. We had some enamel mugs with tea, and tough oatcakes sitting in their newspaper wrapping. A porcelain plate, had it existed, would have been regarded with suspicion and smashed to smithers by your choice of boy.

  Did you hear that, Horace? Did I drift off, again? I did shovel in a bit of opium juice after breakfast this morning; it does tend to make me come over all wifty-wafty. Was that the town hall clock, in High Street? Is it that late? We can always finish this story another time. All right, we’ll push on. I’m parched, if that’s not too much of a hint. Where were we? Bell family meeting in the kitchen.

  Jim pushed some washing to one side and stood in front of the kitchen stove with his coat tail flipped up, warming his backside. I’m forgetting you’ve not met. He’s a ginger-pale, lanky sort with retreating hair already then, and a moustache, and red-raw cheeks, his dome nearly meeting the ceiling. He was balding already at thirty-two, which at that time I thought akin to being about 103. But he was strong and manly and able to fill up a doorway and more. Over six feet. Not the usual requisition for most Lancashire lads, which is five feet and a squinch of inches.

  Jim launched into The Legs for the boys – you never knew when it would begin. A sudden collapse of his legs so they wobbled and jerked about as if unbidden, now flung out sideways, now straight in front, one leg drawing a circle, the other shaking violently. A horrified look would spring onto Jim’s face and he would clasp and grasp his hands hopelessly, chasing his legs about as if determined to get dominion over his own limbs. With music, it becomes a proper eccentric dance. Later the theatrical Press would call it ‘A spasmodic unruliness of his members’. The boys became helpless with laughter every time they saw it.