Ada Read online

  ‘Jim, my boy,’ said Harry backstage one night when we crossed paths in Hull, ‘Listen to yer old mate ’Arry. London’s got fifty theatres, three dozen concert halls and nigh on five hundred music halls, some of which haven’t burned down yet. Australia’s got more people arriving there every day and they’ll all want a night out. They’re jingling gold nuggets in their pockets, frightened of hottentots, and desperate for the songs of Mother England. Let’s take all our girls and boys, and get out where they can get their little hands on milk and eggs and beef and have some air. We can collect pails full of shillings.’ I can remember him saying that, ‘pails full of shillings’, still in his stage suit and hat covered with hundreds of pearly buttons sewn on by Kate. He’d come off after bellowing ‘Wotcher, Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road’ to a half-full house.

  And that’s why we came. There’s a photograph in the album somewhere, Horace – have a rummage. It’s a picture of the ship we came to Australia in – it has unedifying Bovril stains on it, for which I blame Jim, who is lately in charge of the archives. In truth the Oroya looked like any other steamer, even though she was a magic carpet to us. Though in the end we only had enough cash to bring two children of ours – and Alice chose Lizzie and Cissie. The tiny boys went under a new table at a boarding house with their Uncle Walter who ran a bill-sticking business, with James junior as his new apprentice. If you’re ever in the habit of leaving behind small children, let me give you some advice: you have to leave ’em with somebody who’ll make a fist of looking after them. It’s the least you can do.

  What happened to them? Don’t ask as if I wouldn’t know. I’m not in the habit of scattering children like rose petals at a wedding and then taking to my heels. We wrote to them every week in the months and years we were away. And when they grew up we found ways to bring them with us. Charley was with us for years doing electricals and rigging, and James junior was our advance man in the Southern Hemisphere, and now he’s doing it for the Lynch Family Bellringers. Walter won’t speak to us since we got married, so the less said about that the better. Thomas toured with us after he turned ten and was able to make himself useful – you’ll remember him from the India photograph. He’s currently taking the air elsewhere, though I’m spared the details.

  You’re quite correct, Horrie, one way or another a lot of children get left behind in the world. You seem to take an unhealthy interest. This opaque jibber-jabber of yours is rather enervating, I must say. I will say this: in the theatrical world there’s a lot of getting about and leaving things behind. It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to fix later, even if you have a chance. Two can play at being inscrutable, duckie, I used to do it once a night while Professor Baldwin had his turban on. But I promise to be less mysterious next time, if you’ll come again.

  It’s a lovely time for you to stroll home. I can see the honey-coloured late-afternoon light has arrived out there, and the shadows are creeping out long. I had better let you go, your mother will be watching for you, won’t she? I suspect it was she who taught you nice manners. I shall shut my eyes for a moment before my chest gets other ideas and my coughs are set off again. Off you stagger before Lizzie is back from the School of Arts and I shall get onto my moral turpitudes, such as they are, when you come again. Ta ra.

  Here you are again. I was beginning to think I’d seen the last of you. Fair enough, I thought, I’m not as spellbinding as I once was. No, don’t apologise, dearie-oh, I’ve been away myself. I’m not sure if I was asleep when you arrived. We leave the front door unlocked now so anybody can come in and check if I’m worth murdering in my bed. I was just herding together my thoughts, some of them were off out and about. I’m not even sure where we are in the day. Are we having elevenses or afternoon tea, in other words? And have you bought me anything to wash down with a nice hot cup of morphia, I mean tea? Put the kettle on, do.

  Oh, my dearie-oh: a whole box of MacRobertson’s Pineapple Crunch? You are a corker. That is handsome, that is. A lovely canary-yellow cardboard box, it is. I shall keep that, to put treasures in. In the face of the fact that I don’t have any treasures left, I could get hold of a dried rosebud out of a chap’s lapel, I imagine, if I wrestled him to the ground.

  It’s not looking good for my cottage, is it, Horace? They shan’t give me one, I suppose. If you think I’m still in with a prospect, I’ll stoke my hopes and wait for the official verdict – if you come in here with a black hanky on your head I shall guess straight away. I don’t blame the Old Colonists’ Homes for not admitting a lady with possible consumption. Only possible, mind. It might be bronchitis, and that usually clears up eventually. I am sorry about the crimson spots on my hankies here and there. If I wasn’t so wifty-wafty I could make a joke about vinegar getting stains out of your hanky or your character – unless you’re Madam Marzella, who is sour enough – but I can’t quite get there.

  Your dignity ebbs furiously, you know, when you’re ill. And you get awfully tired. I can still wave my arms a bit but my elbows are not fit to be seen, and I find when my arms are in the air my sleeves fall about down the other end of them, instead of staying up at the wrists. Did you ever see such wrists as mine? I’ll say they’re dainty. I’ll be needing an animalcule telescope to see them with, soon.

  There doesn’t seem to be anything left to do but morphia for the pains, and lying down for the tireds. I’ve only just been shot out of the sanatorium – they said there was nowt more they could do with me. Harry and Katie Rickards – as rich as can be, now, the pair of them – paid for two weeks in the Milton private hospital at the top of Flinders Lane, did I tell you that? See if you can find the picture of Kate in the album, done up as a sailor – she looks all full of vim and resolve.

  The Milton sanatorium was all luxury, I’ll tell you. Proper linens, crisp and bleached as snow, and the whitest fluffy candlewick coverlets you ever saw. They sprinkled tea leaves on the floor before every sweeping and took away your spittoon three times a day. And gave me free exerays provided by the government. Sometimes they would make us spit up into a small bottle, which was sent off to the Central Board of Health. I don’t imagine they was ever thrilled to see the postman, do you?

  From my room I could wave out my window at the girls in the back attic of the YWCA building on the corner of Spring Street. In fact, with all our windows open, and what with shoving us chest people onto the balconies day and night we could have strung a wire and done a balancing act had there been any billiard cues and cigar boxes handy, which I can assure you there was not.

  The nurse told me that we all cough the same, whether we’re in Flinders Lane or Madagascar. She said it’s called ‘tuberculosis’ at Echuca Sanatorium, ‘white plague’ in The Truth, ‘consumption’ in The Argus, ‘chest trouble’ to a patient’s face in Flinders Lane and ‘phthisis’ on the death certificate. (Try saying that after an absinthe or two.) They used the exerays on me there for free but I don’t think they helped. They may as well put me in an Evans Vacuum Helmet to cure balding.

  They charged three guineas for a week’s bed and breakfast at the Milton sanitorium, which is enough to make anybody’s breathing more difficult. I would get better again or I wouldn’t, the doctor said. I think even The Calculating Boy could have told them that. Any road, they were right. I got better for a while and then it all went the other way again. I’ve come home here to have a cough in peace – it’s cheaper, and you get a better strata of visitor. There’s a pretty compliment for you, Horrie. A poor soul left her babby on the front steps of the hospital when I was there, with a little brown-paper parcel of extra clothes, and that was quite enough for me. Better off at home where nobody shoves infants through your letterbox. Don’t look at me like that – treat an old treasure gently. I’m fixing to tell you the lot now, as it can hardly matter any more.

  As time slipped by I got into rather a bad fettle and now I think only luck, not money can save me. I proceeded to look more and more scraggled, and now when I gaze into the looking glass a
great-grandmother peers out at me with sink-eyes and a hectic flush on her cheeks. As my cough gets lower the spirits follow. They say consumption is caused by dust, and milk, and being a poor specimen, you know. I never drink milk and I was a bonny creature, so I suppose it must be dust – though there’s hardly a body in Australia unbathed in dust from October to May of any given year.

  Cures? Take your pick, dearie-oh. Rattlesnake venom, if you please, the injection of tuberculosis bacteria, any mystery elixir you care to send a money order for, fasting, strychnine, staying drunk, making yourself sick, warm milk (they’re awfully confused about the milk). Heavy work with a pick and shovel is the latest suggestion from some brainbox in England, who I think I can safely ignore. They may as well say it’s cured by Pineapple Crunch – at least we’d go to God slightly cheered up and with bulging cheeks, eh?

  I did keep one cutting from an article in The Argus of which I was particularly fond: it’s a speech by an eminent British medical man, what’s he called? Sounds like a pantomime villain. It’s tucked in the back of the scrapbook. What does that say there? Sir Lauder Brunton, he’s the one. Pass the magnifier and I’ll read it to you: ‘One of the saddest facts concerning this terrible malady is that it seems to take a delight in attacking the most interesting members of a household; the intellectual man or woman together with the most loveable and kindly, seem peculiarly prone to succumb to it.’ What a poppet.

  I’m glad you ask, Horace – there’s always hope, don’t you think? Consumption is prevented, they say, by singing – that’s not working, I’ve been singing my head off for thirty years – and rest and ease and fresh air, and perfectly marvellous food, and lots of new, clean clothes laundered by experts, and more rest and ease and sunlight in rooms. In other words it’s prevented by being rich.

  Speaking of rich, you’ve found the picture of my dear benefactor, Kate Rickards. We sewed that Union Jack skirt costume together on the boat to Australia, for her character as Tootsie Sloper, husband seeker and admiral’s daughter in ‘The Land Lubber’ – I still address every letter to her with ‘Hello, Toots’. ‘The Land Lubber’ was the farce we rehearsed all the way on the ship. Harry had paid a famous panto-scribbler to write it specially for him and Kate to star in, and the rest of us in the Harry Rickards Specialty Company were the players.

  After we first arrived in Australia we did it every night. An Irishman called Pat Murphy – brace yourself – did all the Irish parts, and I was Tootsie’s gal pal. Alice played a beetle-browed old harridan called Miss Euphemia Grimshaw and gave it some face, and Jim and Harry had a few roles apiece. Jim did his usual blackface in burnt cork with a bones solo and comic banjo song and was also a flirty dude called Frederic Fripples and a drunken doctor. Don’t ask me the plot. The boy, Harry, got the girl, Kate, and I think there was a hornpipe in the middle of it. Dear old Eunice Fernandez ran the band, when she wasn’t too sherry-shickered. It never affected her looks, mind. Eunice attracted so many mashers in the front row we called her The Big Potato.

  ‘The Land Lubber’ was tremendous fun to do, though it was never quite a hit. We all did lots of thundering in and out, skidding across the stage and pretending to get the lines wrong. Years later people would come up and say, ‘I was in the night the Irishman forgot his line and the table fell over.’ ‘Really?’ we’d gaily reply.

  By the time we were on that mail steamer to Australia I was well-seasoned and – no need for any maths, if you please – a girl, shall we say, possibly just past twenty. It was fitting, rehearsing ‘The Land Lubber’ on the second saloon deck of the Oroya. Some of it we did lying down under shade cloth in the tropics and some were shouted into the wind with everything tied on. Tied on to ourselves, I mean – our hats, our reticules and the odd child – so they didn’t blow overboard.

  I was always good at learning my lines. All that time in steamers and coaches and train cars. We were often squashed in together, repeating a scene over and over. I’d be muttering to myself like a crank in the corner. Sometimes we had printed scripts for the farces, and later, more often Jim would scribble something down and we’d work it aloud until it felt right, yammering at each other over the sounds of a ship’s engine, a rattling coach or a fuffing train. Jim has a little book he always keeps jokes and ideas in, even now, and he’d sometimes lick a finger and riffle through it looking for a morsel or a gag that fitted into a dead spot. He was always hung about with his appurtenances: the jokes book, a drawstring bag around his neck with emergency money, a little account book with a pencil on a ribbon, and a diary full of engagements and slips of correspondence from advance men. And the cosh, always in his left side pocket.

  For the first few days of the voyage we was apart from other second-saloon passengers – they was standoffish, from the school of suspicion. Now that I think back we were a pretty odd bunch, wearing various bits of shiny business and hopping about and shouting lines at each other. They warmed up when they realised theatricals wasn’t all gorgon streetwalkers, just families with high spirits and better jokes than they had.

  Sometimes we’d wake up in somebody else’s second- or third-class cabin as all twelve of us from the Harry Rickards Specialty Company all mixed in together – there were Kate and Harry Rickards and their three little ’uns, and the Bells, Alice and Jim with our Lizzie and Cissie. We’d had to leave the boys, as you know. We just didn’t have a big enough stake to bring them along, as they weren’t old enough then to be useful. We had to bring Cissie and Lizzie of course, Alice was immovable about that, and I often wondered what the boys made of it, or what was in Alice’s past that made her keep the girls so close.

  We all knew giving the boys a better start meant leaving them behind, but that didn’t make it any easier.

  Alice and her face were forever over at the railings giving the distance a good stare. Jim would go and talk to her quietly, and I know he was saying we’ll get back to them soonest. He just wanted to make enough money to keep his family out of the factories, but it turned out there was always too much family balanced against how much money we had. Jim wanted Alice to be happy, but he may as well have tried to teach a giraffe to make a pudding. She thought about the boys all the time. Though James junior was old enough to belt around on his bicycle and help his Uncle Walter stick up the bill-posters, Thomas was only four and hard to keep track of no matter how much the older boys were tasked with the job.

  I know you’re still curious about the Under-the-Table Boys, Horace, but we tried our best to see them safe. We theatricals might be different when it comes to mentioning unmentionables, but we’re the same when it comes to feelings and regrets. There’s an unglamorous side to theatricals but there’s no mystery about it, if that’s what you’re hinting at. All the boys were present and accounted for. Sometimes you seem more like a member of the curious constabulary than an aficionado of the music hall, Horrie.

  So. Harry seemed to know all five hundred Oroya passengers singly within a week, constantly touching his hat to all alike, from to the ‘Christian cosmologist’ who explained how the devil lived in the sea near Pitcairn Island, to the toffee-nosed crowd from the first saloon.

  There was a Mrs Harriet Sanders who sat on a wicker lounge chair and exercised a squashing manner. Mrs Harriet Sanders was the sort who doesn’t need you to start her off. Very strong on the subject of people having to accept their lot in life. This is quite the popular position amongst the sort of person whose lot involves warm, dry feet, lovely breakfasts, and a regular tipple that won’t take the enamelling off.

  Mrs Harriet Sanders was a widow and everyone felt Mr Sanders had chosen the wiser course. Each morning at nine o’clock Mrs Sanders dragged a second-saloon wicker deckchair into the midst of others who’d been happy with their own company. She wore a pile of mourning clothes topped with a hat tied down by yards of black gauze material in which she resembled a walrus caught in a net in the dark. Resisting the siren call of a book, or watercolours, or improving thoughts, she would wait until almost
twelve seconds past nine o’clock and launch into unsolicited, dirge-like lessons in logical theology while she rummaged in a drawstring bag for fluffy old pieces of butterscotch.

  ‘You see, children,’ Mrs Sanders would announce, one cheek bulging, ‘the Christian God gives us crops to eat such as wheat and cucumbers, ready to harvest close to the ground. The heathen Arab He punishes with tall palm trees, the delicious dates far out of reach. And the African must content himself with the roaring lions a vengeful Lord sends, while He furnishes us Britons with delicious little docile lambs who only look at us with trusting eyes and tremble as their throats are slashed so we may eat them.’ Little Cissie called her ‘Mrs Frighty in her black nightie’.

  The instant Mrs Sanders was depleted of butterscotch the children would explore the Oroya’s deck area, dodging gigantic ropes and spars and pulleys and masts and funnels and curved things; cabinets with louvred roll-doors that the deckchairs came out of, big-hooked swing-arms holding up the lifeboats, bollards with polished bald heads, coiled ropes as thick as a navvy’s arm, cargo hatches, the scooped air vents, and dangling pulleys the size of footballs.

  The storms in the Bay of Biscay kept us swept off the decks and tossed us about below stairs. ‘It’s a wonder we don’t end up sailing into Adelaide clinging to a handful of blarsted splinters, see if we don’t,’ Jim growled. By the second week almost everyone were used to the thumps and shakes and spasming of the engines and the ship herself, bashings about and shudders that affected the steerage passengers the most. The first-class saloon passengers with possum rugs on their knees and tea appearing magically at their elbow complained to their servants long after everyone else had been told to put a bag over it.