Ada Page 4

  Jim stopped, set his feet apart, eyes front, in a perfect calm, only taking his hands out of his pockets to roll himself a skinny smoke from a tin. ‘I told you I could hold The Strand in the palm of my hand!’ he’d say, making us all groan. Performing at one of the theatres on The Strand was the pinnacle for music-hall artists then, you see. And a strand of tobacco. Oh, never mind. We can’t all be quick in the head, Horace, you poor duck.

  I knew what was coming in the meeting, and I scrunched my own hands together very tightly and hoped so hard I felt it pinch up through my shoulders. Of course, they were pinching already; I’d had ten hours on the jacquard loom at the Albion. Everyone looked at Jim.

  ‘Mam,’ said Jim, fiddling with one of his moustaches, ‘We can send money, so you don’t have to go back to millwork yourself. But if you’ll let us take Ada with us, we can sell ourselves as a troupe again. I’ve got a nice little bells act coming along that Ada can do, to take the weight from Alice.’

  ‘You are a Bells act,’ said Ma.

  ‘No, with bells that tinkle-tinkle, Mam. Alice has been sewing them onto cuffs and gaiters that we can slip on and off. Look.’ Jim and Alice unbent themselves from the table, and in the postage stamp-sized kitchen under the washing, they did a sort of Morris dance jig with some domestic ding-dong dialogue that Jim had been writing. You had to use your imaginations for the bells. Poor Alice made rather a lumber of it. Jim put his head up into the hem of a dangling, wet shirt and pulled it around his face as a baby’s bonnet, and made an imploring face at Ma Bell. She laughed.

  Jim exchanged a look with Alice and went out back to the lavvy, swearing as he encountered a hail of icy needles: drizzle flirting with the idea of being snow. In all the years after, watching Jimmy argue terms with theatre managers and organise tours of the world, and alone with his clever, scholarly letters convince the New South Wales railway authorities to institute a fairer baggage allowance for theatricals, seeing him bravely step to the front lights and threaten to biff the schnozzes of any unruly audience members, I still remember how he scarpered out the back door and sent in his wife to parley with his mother.

  Alice had that strong jaw and a resolute face, and tightly curled black hair with fluffy sections before her ears, no cheekbones to speak of, with dark, straight verandah eyebrows and eyes close together, all the better to bore into you. You didn’t remonstrate with Alice if you could help it.

  Alice took a breath. ‘Ma,’ she said. ‘When I do the skipping act sometimes I do a little tinkling myself. It’s all the jumping. It’s worse after every baby.’ She rested her hands on her big middle. ‘We want to train up Ada so I can find something a bit less wearing on me. It’s bad enough having to bandage me jubblers for weeks after each bab. I have to strap them down tight before every turn, so they don’t give me pains or squirt anyone in the first row.’ There was a perfect pause. ‘And now when I jump up and down, I’m in danger of skidding on my own mother-puddles,’ she added, all mournful.

  People thought Alice didn’t mean to be funny. She knew all right; she had peerless timing. Hers was one of the standard characters of vaudeville and music hall – the cheerless soul, the blank-faced, beset little tramp. The problem for Alice was that the besetting wasn’t falling over a hat onstage, or come by in a song about a girl friend who’d run off with the butcher’s boy. It was her life.

  Ma pushed a sweep of fair-to-grey hair from her forehead. ‘Enough, my girl,’ she said, though Alice was almost twenty-seven by then and soon to be a mother of six. ‘You can have Ada. Shall I have Lizzie, to help me here?’ Lizzie put her head on her mother’s neck and tried to peek sideways at her face. There was a squawk from under the table, and Lizzie leaned down and took tiny Walter up on her lap and jogged him. The feeling around the table made me hoppity, so I got up and mixed some condensed milk from the tin into warm water from the kettle, and put it in a teat-glass for him.

  ‘No,’ said Alice in a sure voice. ‘We must have Lizzie with us. Between engagements we are teaching her music and word reading. If she comes here she’ll end up at the mill, or a washerwoman, and a bad one, with her eyes. We want the new life for as many as we can get out, Ma.’ Ma Bell looked away and I’m only just seeing as I tell it to you now, that she knew in that moment she wouldn’t be one who had the new life. That no matter what happened to the rest of us it was too late for her, already past forty after all.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ma.’ said Alice, into the quiet. ‘I know it’s a hardship. We’ll send all the money we can. If you can’t take them it will be the workhouse and the family will be in bits. You know we can’t take up engagements if the boys are with us, it’s like travelling with drunken monkeys. I know what we’re asking, Ma. Jim can’t bring himself to look you in the face. But there it is.’ arriving’. She slipped her feet out of her clogs and warmed them with a shuffle on James junior’s tummy, under the table. It was surprising quiet under there. I wonder if they knew what it meant, that they would be left behind again, and this time without me.

  ‘They’ll be good boys, I’m sure. It does seem a peculiar thing that families have to be apart in order to stay together,’ Ma said.

  Jim crashed back in the back door, letting in a slap of wind that swirled the smoke around the washing, the loops of his braces dangling beneath his coat. He rubbed his big hands together. ‘All settled, then?’

  ‘Oh, get the kettle back on the hob, you hulking great gawby,’ Ma said. ‘I’ve been seeing to babbies for thirty-five years or more now, and what else is there?’ A hopeful little voice piped from under the table: ‘Jam?’

  I laughed with everyone, but I felt a sizzle, too. A sizzle that’s the fear of something good, I don’t quite know how else to explain it. And a bit of guilt mixed in for leaving Ma with the boys. It isn’t joy that makes your heart beat fast, you know. It’s fear does that. Fear and excitement, or are they the same thing? Both of ’em make you come over seasick. I wanted more than anything to get out from under my shawl, and leave behind getting knocked up for the early shift, to pack a smart little bag and become an adventuress – though I’d heard the word I didn’t know it was another way of saying fallen woman until I was more than thirty. I thought it sounded like a marvellous thing to be.

  I was desperate for fun and new sights and a proper dress that I didn’t have to wear a pinafore over, pale enough to be respectable and bright enough to lift the spirits. And I wanted to do serio-comic singing on stage, and hear people laugh at me in a nice way. I wanted to make enough money to go into a little posh shop with a copper-edged curved window, that sells ladies things and rosettes and fripperies and say, ‘That gown, only in lilac, I think, if you would be so kind.’ And I wanted lady shoes, not clomping clogs. Knickers that had never been worn by anyone else. Just try not to wriggle with the luxury of that, will you?

  Not many escaped the life they’re born into. How can you? There’s hardly a road out of it, if not for the theatrical business, or travelling halfway round the world to stumble over a gold nugget the size of your shoe. Despite everything that happened, and the way fortune blew hot and cold for us, we were lucky. It’s powerful hard to get out of what you were born into, but travel and the theatre business is a good start. You could get off a steamer the other side of the world with a new name and a spanking new history.

  The truth of it was that Jim got so many of us out he was like a miracle man – to me, at least. He told me what to do; I did it, and it worked. I got out of Blackburn. That first time on stage at the local Bijou I were supposed to make my entrance at a sedate walk, stand on the chalk mark, and warble a song about my dearest boy in a green field and love that lasts through all weathers. I’m told that I bolted on like a startled horse, opened my cakehole and began careering through the chorus.

  It was the fizziness, you see. Like I was made of aerated water. It made me forget the words after ‘I loved him in all weathers’. I looked in horror at the audience, and the wee orchestra stopped and looked at me. I don’t kn
ow where it came from, but I put my hands on my hips and shouted towards the back row, ‘Mind you, he ought to have had the sense to come in out of the rain!’

  On the other side of the gaslights they roared with laughter, so I nodded at the band leader and we were off again. I came off twelve feet tall and felt balloony for hours. I learned there was more than one way to skin an audience, and when in doubt, brazen it out.

  Those early years were a whirl of travel with Alice and Jim, me and little Lizzie bunked in together, and sometimes back in Blackburn under the table and practising in the lanes, back to shifts at the mills when engagements were slow, poring over the lines Jim gave me by lamplight at the kitchen table while the boys snuffled underneath.

  Lancashire was groaning with people doing it hard, then. Some of the old folk had very pointed faces, no clackers left in their mouths, born into want and rickets and constant calamity. Lived right into their fifties, some of them, pulling apart tarred rope in the workhouse, eating a cup of cornmeal twice a day. Ma Bell used to say starving to death was very hard work, and the pay was terrible. But I was going to walk the other way. To the train station.

  Of all those Blackburn years I seem to remember only two springs when the fallen hawthorn blossom in clouds clung to your hem walking in Corporation Park of a Sunday afternoon. The rest is all winter in my memory, with slush underneath and jaundiced coal-smoke haze above. I saw that sky again a few times in Australia, the sun struggling like a gaslight in fog, when there were bushfires. In Australia, that orange glow behind the grey is the dread warning. With the smell of burning eucalyptus leaves it makes everyone skittish, even the horses. And of course in Australia it’s the sun that smacks you about, not the snow.

  I’ll tell you, dearie-oh, never mind the postcard: no matter how many bush-bearded louts tried to look up my costume, even after a landlady in ghastly digs had the flatface to put blown mutton in front of us for supper, we’d still say, ‘It beats the mills.’

  But after that family meeting it was another six years or so before we could skip aboard the steamship Oroya on the London docks and stand at the railings waiting for her to take us to the other side of the world. It didn’t happen all in a puff of vermilion smoke like a conjurer does things.

  I had my first mentions in The Era, in the penny-a-line advertisements from auditioning stage managers calling us back from auditions to be on a music-hall bill for a night or two. And then years of playing the ‘smalls’ – the little halls that itself became routine, until Alice and I had our first carriage accident, had ourselves hurled into the street coming home after a Lambeth engagement. A few asterisks on the footpath and a night in hospital. I could have stayed a week just for the rice pudding.

  There were six years between Blackburn and the steamship and in that time Ma and Pa Bell was snatched up to their own glories, so I lost my second set of parents. I’ve been of no fixed address since then, if you don’t count where I am now. And in those six years Alice got herself up to eight children. At least when the senior Bells went to glory we had the boys back with us from under the table for a while.

  Ah, Horrie, there’s more to say that I don’t like to remember. Though Alice had eight children, there were only seven left when we got on the boat and only two came with us. Having spares in your new family, I discovered, was no guarantee against heartache.

  The boys were not useful at all being too wee and legally required to be at school, but Lizzie made herself as useful as she could during those years, at eight or nine she could repair and alter costumes, and dart about staring steadily at costermongers until they gave her extra vegetables, and got supper for us when we came home from the halls. Alice relied on her to watch Amy, who was the baby that had been in Alice’s middle that night of the meeting round the kitchen table.

  No sooner than she learned to toddle about, Amy caught an enfeebling cough that no amount of castor oil and Dr Valery’s Energising Pills could help. She seemed to fight to breathe some nights, and began to turn her head from a spoonful of porridge or condensed milk and sugar, keeping her mouth closed, looking tired of us all, her little star-shaped hands folded into fists. We couldn’t afford a doctor though the apothecary in the high street said it was galloping consumption, which made Alice shout at him and cause a scene.

  One night we got back to our lodging from anchoring the middle of the bill at the Empire. Alice, though awfully large about the middle yet again, had been with us doing the ironing and mending for others on the bill, for a few extra pennies. We’d left Lizzie at home with Amy. We came in the door quiet as we could, in case they was asleep. But Lizzie was sitting in the corner against the skirting board with her knees drawn up, looking as lost as she ever would, staring at nowt, silent tears running down her face. She had wrapped herself in a shawl, all pulled up over her hair like a little mill worker, and wrapped tight to her chest she was tenderly rocking the little bony body of Amy, now as cold as the terrible room.

  Over the years Jim and I have heard many remarks that Alice and Lizzie were each ‘too serious’. People talk a lot of gumflappery without having the history attached to the business. If anyone had ever felt as wretched as Alice and Lizzie did that night, and all the nights we had thereafter, they wouldn’t have bothered remarking on solemn countenances. We all waded about in a fog of sorrow for a long time.

  Less than a fortnight after they took Amy away to be buried, Alice stopped in the same room one morning to birth Cissie. Years later in a Dunedin saloon, a reporter from the Otago Daily Times in New Zealand made a joke about women who had so many children they didn’t miss the ones who decided to die. It took five men to hold Jim off the man and it was well we embarked the next day.

  In the early days we mostly worked the music halls in the North and London and tried to keep the boys with us. All we could think about was getting fed and trying to get warm. Jim was the guv’nor at work and Lizzie and Alice managed the home as best they could. You don’t become accustomed to getting orphaned twice, and I don’t recommend it. After that you takes your family where you can get it, and I was lucky to have Jim and Alice.

  We all mucked along into 1888 in that two-room airless shocker in Lambeth. Jim and Alice, and me, and Lizzie, at twelve the senior, down through James, William, Charles, Walter, Cissie, and finally (most assuredly finally, said Alice), scrawny baby Thomas with a bung leg. We had a mean little larder, and outside a spigot and a ghastly privy shared with multitudes.

  Me and the girls would sit higgledy-piggledy on top of each other around the fire, sometimes sprinkling in almost powdered coal, our hair wetted with sugar water and spiral-bound into fat, bandaged sausages, gently steaming into ringlets. You could hear everything, neighbours on both sides and behind, and outside, the great caterwaul of London, people stacked two storeys high on the omnibuses with the struggling horses.

  By then we was on a few music-hall bills here and there with Jim’s great pal Harry Rickards. They’d been together on a South African tour where James junior was born, which is why Harry was his godfather and his middle name was Rickards. Harry had talked for years of forming a company to take down to Australia; and we were ready to follow him. Harry was a good man to lead a troupe: he didn’t mind a scuffle, knew how to breeze out of town before dawn, had experience of the bankruptcy courts, was generous when flush with cash, and he knew Australia from his tours of the 1860s.

  He said he’d seen the Brunswick strongman bend a shilling (and then he pinched the shilling). He’d visited every saloon in Bourke Street in order of coming down the hill, he said, and knew all the best theatre managers, some of whom he didn’t even owe money to. He’d already toured for years and years by then. ‘Our ’Arry’ was a famous ‘lion comique’. That’s a headliner on a music-hall bill, Horace, the one who belts out the comic songs. Harry was the sort of man who took up a lot of room in the world. If he were a woman he’d be a hoyden, Harry. He liked rhyming slang and backward slang – all the boys was yobs and his boots was stoobs.
On stage he was the perfect costermonger barrow boy with a boomer baritone. But he understood the satire of burlesques, the joy of farce, the thrill of a panto spectacle at Christmas-time, the tradition of minstrel shows. He was a born talent-finder.

  By then all of us were thoroughly fed up with the oppressive coal-smut air of the North and foul brown fogs of the capital. London even smelled like Hell, what with the sulphur in the air. We performed some nights when the choking miasmas came in the theatre, and the performances were obscured from a few rows back.

  That last English winter had hammered us like a blacksmith on a rush job. Harry had married his second wife’s sister, the singing trapeze artiste, Mademoiselle Katrini. Harry and Katie had lost one little baby to whooping cough and had three children left, the two girls struggling with scarlet fever, and a sickly baby boy. Every single one of our Under-the-Table Boys had a tearing London cough. Both mothers, Alice and Kate, were fiercely set on getting their surviving children out of the killing fogs of London.

  Neither one of them had a photograph or even a drawing of their babies gone before. The rich could drape their mirrors in lengths of heavy black silk with the wavy watermark pattern of mourning and hire funeral carriages with matching black horses with glossy black head plumes. The well-off had personal stationery with black edges and made-to-measure gowns with matching black bonnets and capes with jet beads. We theatricals would borrow or rent funeral clothes, and hope to afford a short run of standard-issue black memorial cards, stamped deep in gold ink with the name of the person who died, and the years we had them. After a funeral, or the cart came and went, we had to powder our mottled faces, climb back on the stage and urge the audience to join in a cheery singalong. And then we’d pack up the props and move to the next engagement, away from the grave, perhaps forever.