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  Harry Rickards never had a moment of seasickness, strolling around on a pyramid angle, whistling and raising his hat, while everyone else was ill for days on end, the ship rolling from side to side or pitching up and down waves, while stewards ran about with buckets of carbolic and sea water to scrub out corridors and cabins, and the deck. ‘Ooooh, it’s a fearful motion,’ groaned Lizzie at one point, which forever after became the Bell family review. (‘How was her dancing?’ ‘A fearful motion, I’m afraid.’)

  Cissie, at six, had taken to addressing everyone as if they was in the back row of the gallery gods. If asked, ‘What’s for dinner today?’ she’d answer by bellowing: ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Today we have The Incredible Mutton. Ladies and gents, tomorrow there will be an entire change of programme! Except there won’t, because we’ll be having dread mutton again. Please move calmly towards the fire doors.’

  Or, apropos of not a thing, ‘For your delight, Harry Rickards will now sing a thousand blarsted songs.’ Or ‘May I have your attention, as my mother is now going to make you howl with laughter, or run you through with a darning needle.’ She looked like Alice, with dark-brown eyes, but had her dad’s impish nature, a natural chirper always on the lookout for fun. She would sit on Jim’s knee and ‘help’ him invent ridiculous ditties. Cissie often got hold of an overheard phrase and looked for rhymes. Alice had the dickens of a time persuading her not to say ‘Ask my Nancy, whatever takes your fancy’ without explaining that your ‘nancy’ could mean something altogether else for reasons we would certainly not be discussing.

  Lizzie was already a stagehand by then with a specialty in ‘making herself useful’. She would practise with an easel, swapping on and off cardboard signs announcing each act, followed by a dippy curtsey. She set out Jim’s props, picked them up and stored them. Though with Jim’s colouring and her flashing spectacles, solemn Lizzie was very much Alice’s girl. ‘Passable voice’ is not what you want to see on a poster, so it was fortunate that Lizzie had already shown a remarkable ability with any instrument she could get her hands on, from banjo to zither.

  On board the Oroya, we ladies were under Kate Rickards’ guidance to help to make the costumes – she packed all manner of fancy trims and feathers and stuffs. We made jaunty cockades, and cunning little military-style, dusk-blue jackets with gold frogging and cuff detail. Kate was desperate to add real bullion-thread epaulettes but we couldn’t afford them. The jackets went with tri-couleur swirly skirts for the hornpipe scene: they were very true to life, if every sailor in the merchant marine gets about in a ruffled, gypsy-style skirt stiffened with cord in the hem.

  All the children loved Kate’s ‘treasure box’, as they called her haberdashery bag. Lengths of tassels and fringing. Pieces of wire and crystal beads to thread on the ends so they could quiver in mid-air above your frock, or your hair. Gold ribbons, and winking crystal beads, and little jars of oes – do you not know about oes, duckie? Those wee spangles in the shape of an ‘O’, like a tiny coin with a hole in the middle. She were a glimmer-girl, Kate. She began as a trapeze artist at eleven – Madamoiselle Katrini, Fairy of the Air – so she knew how costumes must be made to allow movement, and what was best seen from a long way away underneath you or from above, up in the gods.

  Did I tell you Kate wasn’t Harry’s first wife? He had been married to her sister, Lottie, but she died of a cut from the trapeze rigging that went bad. Harry and Katie was both heartbroken, mourned together, and then married. Oh, don’t start that again, there’s no law against it. Families happen in all sorts of peculiar ways, don’t they? Lottie and Katie weren’t even proper sisters. Lottie and her acrobatic troupe had been on tour, staying at a pub, and offered the landlord six pounds to apprentice his daughter as a circus flyer and take her with them. That’s another way to get relatives. Blood isn’t always the most important thing, Horace.

  The best luck Harry ever had was Katie. Harry knows talent, but Kate knows everything else. For thirty years she could always see a whole production in her head before it opened; she began by sketching and stitching, and ended up designing all the costumes and sets, knowing what would look best on stage. They built on every success they had. They got their leg up when Harry sneaked onto an early steamer ahead of his rivals and raced to sign up two years’ worth of contracts with artists in England and America. They followed Kate’s hunches on the best theatres to lease or build in which cities, and now they’ve got the Tivoli circuit, every big city sewn up: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, with arrangements in New Zealand, so one show travels everywhere. That was Kate’s idea. They re-use the costumes and sets in every town, and it cuts the cost.

  Katie could always see the possibilities and how to make the most of them and had the kindest of hearts, so I don’t begrudge her wealth now. I just can’t quite understand why I don’t have fluppence besides. On the boat Katie used to watch the albatrosses wheeling over the stern. I couldn’t see what an albatross were good for – and to be fair, not many albatrosses can see the point of me. But Kate knew in an instant she could have a beautiful snowy-white muff from one of their breasts, and keep the children busy: she sent them off with fishing line, hooks begged from the sailors and bread cadged from the kitchen. With the help of a deckhand taxidermist, paid with a quarter-pint of brandy from what Harry called the Emoluments Trunk, Kate got her muff by the time we were halfway across the Indian Ocean. She didn’t give a spit for the old sailor superstition about albatrosses. ‘If you’re lucky enough, you get to make your own luck,’ she said firmly. I didn’t twig at the time it was probably the wisest thing I’d ever heard.

  And by the time we got to Melbourne, we all had beautiful, fitted costumes, lined and reinforced and glittering with spangles and topped with round drummer-boy hats that went into cunning parts to lie flat for packing. Even now I’ll wager if you turned up to the Rickards mansion perched above Sydney’s harbour this afternoon and said, ‘We need an hour programme for this evening’, Katie Rickards could rustle you up a team of tumblers, a comedian, and some singers and make you some duds with tassels out of the curtains by showtime.

  Did you never see Harry’s costumes she designed for him? One with hundreds of pearly-buttons, another with sunshine-yellow and sky-blue checks, one with silly shortened trousers. And a tangerine frockcoat lined with lime-green silk, with a hidden wire threaded all around the hems and down the arms so it stood up perfectly by itself, and could be yanked off by hidden means and suspended in mid-air. Even in his day clothes he were arresting: a perfect pincushion for sparkly tie pins. ‘What do you say, my dear Dellie,’ he’d ask me, fingering his lapels with pride. ‘Preeezentable?’

  Del, that’s how people knew me in the profession. Short for Delroy. Everyone had a nickname, a stage name and a christened name. I don’t think it’s at all odd. I call you Horrie, after all. King George is known as Bertie to his family, and probably Squiffy-Whoffy to his wife, and she’s got herself a stage-Queen name too. She was Victoria Something Augusta Louise Olga Thingummy Pauline Bertie Claudine Howsyerfather Agnes of Teck and now she’s Queen Mary, so try not to look suspicious.

  We performed on the boat with the captain’s permission, to get some cash in. Harry said best to do it before Naples when everyone would be overawed by Vesuvius throwing out sparks all night and spend all their spare sixpences on oranges to eat on the deck. So the night before we docked in Italy we performed on a raised part of the deck with oil lamps around the edge, even though some of the ship lights was electric. For atmosphere, you see. Fresh buckets had been brought out from the sand room in case of fire and a junior sailor sat in charge of each lamp.

  Harry and Kate did their version of courting bliss, a two-hander called ‘The Firkytoodlers’, which children adored. ‘Enough of your fimble-famble sir,’ said Kate, glancing up from under her hat brim and half curtseying. Harry stood gaping at her like a love-struck dolt, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat.

  ‘You’re all the way there, yo
u are,’ he said admiringly.

  ‘Ooo-er, I’ve never been anywhere near there in m’life,’ said Kate, looking to one side and patting her hat. She turned away from Harry and opened her mouth in mock shock, moving in a wide arc like the sweeping beam from a lighthouse.

  Jim and I had Pierrot costumes with triangle hats, each with bells sewn on. We had gaiters of bells all the way down the sleeves and the outside of the pantaloons. We’d each lift a leg in unison and twirl it for a cascade of bells for each punchline, and we worked out how to play the latest songs using our arms and legs. We did that same patter for years, all about two sweethearts who was politely at each other’s throats. ‘Yairs’, Jim would say pompously, ‘my recitals have caused a great deal of talk.’ ‘Congrats,’ I’d reply, ‘what a shame it was all during your performance.’ And I’d poke my tongue out to delighted roars.

  I own that it’s peculiar that I played Jim’s sweetheart in so many songs and farces for so many years as Alice looked on – well, she didn’t often watch, she was usually getting Cissie to sleep on a wicker basket in the dressing-room. And don’t think for a single tick of the clock that there was anything unedifying going on in those days. I didn’t imagine myself married to Jimmy, he was uncle-brother- father-overseer to me. I couldn’t help but love him, could I? The Bells were all I had in the world, but it wasn’t that sort of love then, and I’ll swear it on the graves of all four of my parents.

  Later in his cabin with us all crowded in, Harry counted the coins in the buckets the children had lugged around. ‘Three pounds. Not too shabby.’

  We had rehearsed till we could do it in our sleep (and sometimes did, twitching and dreaming away), but I was to learn that it’s only doing a sketch hundreds of times in front of an audience what shows you the right pace, and where to leave gaps for the laugh and how long, or which face prods the biggest response out of them.

  We had the usual crawl through the dreaded Canal and then seemed to shoot straight into pristine blue tropical yonders. We called at the Colombo docks to become acquainted with mangoes and jewels and then sailed out into where the sky mashes itself into the Indian Ocean as seamless curtains of rain. We Lancashire folk weren’t strangers to rain. We had a thousand words for it – smizzling, drizzling, mizzling, soaked and sodden and a’wetted, the dampin’ and the witchettin’, the spitting and the sleet omptyin’ t’street. Or ‘lumps’. But the tropical rain south of the equator wasn’t sullen and stubborn, like English weather. It was furious, lashing fits of rain that washed everything clean and smashed things about and flooded everything, then turned off like a spigot and there was rainbows and bright, hard sunshine, with razor-sharp shadow edges, as if pretending there’d never been any rain at all.

  I could see the curve of the earth in the distance, though Alice said it was all probably flat anyway, a trick of the light would see us sailing off the edge any day now.

  Some nights it were too hot to be down below. We’d all lie on the deck after eleven o’clock, men to starboard and women to port, looking up at unfamiliar stars: thousands more than you could ever see through the fogs and miasmas of England. The moon unfurled its silver pathway across the top of the ocean. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to open an eye on those nights a small knot of midshipmen and the captain had gathered on the darker side of the ship with a low lantern and a book.

  They would murmur a prayer and quietly lower one or two calico bags and perhaps a smaller parcel over the side, and slip them into the inky sea. I knew that some passengers had died of the roseola measles, but I don’t know how many in all got on the boat alive and went off it dead. I would close my eyes and pray – a few words for them, but mostly for us, that we’d be spared. I’ve never been one for the church, they don’t seem good company as a rule, but when I think there might be some up-to-glory snatchery afoot, I tend to pray like blazes. I’m on my knees most nights, now. Well, I would be if I could get up easy. I don’t suppose God minds if you’re stuck in bed when you pray. Probably just glad to hear the tap at his window at all.

  The first I saw of Australia was when its western edge sharpened into view. Jim said it was five weeks to the day since we’d nosed out of the Thames. We followed the coast for a few hours, an unfurling ribbon of white sand, a smudged line above of red soil above it, like embers. Grassy sage-bushes of some kind. We saw no signs of life but a telescoping eyeglass was passed around so we could see a party of kangaroos on a beach – which for some reason seemed perfectly hilarious. We could not have been more surprised if a kangaroo fetched its own telescope out of a pouch and looked straight back at us.

  Why did we get off the boat in Adelaide instead of Melbourne? That’s a good question. I didn’t think much then about ‘whys’ then, or even ‘hows’. That was Harry and Jim’s job, and the rest of us were just told.

  When I come to think on it, I can’t hardly remember a single decision I made for myself from then until now. Like everyone else in the world I was born into a family without anybody asking me about it, then given to another family. I was handed a new name, and though the theatre troupe was named for me, it was Jim or Harry or Professor Baldwin or necessity that decided where we would perform. And then the one enormous decision I did make was the hardest thing I could have imagined. Yes, of course I’m going to tell you. Don’t rush a body.

  But I think, on reflection, we started in Adelaide because the Theatre Royal there was run by one of Harry’s old mates, and it was on the way to Melbourne, so we could run the show in a bit, and have it purring along before we hit the big city. We did ‘The Land Lubber’, and then the second half was minstrel-style. You don’t know the music-hall minstrel style? Next you’ll be asking me what’s a brandy and soda. You were behind the door when they gave out the fun, you was.

  Minstrel style is everyone sitting in a row of chairs across the stage, waiting for their turn. Think of it as a parlour or a pub where friends get up and recite a poem, or tell a joke, or play the piano. On the left end of the line sits a bones and banjo player called ‘Mr Bones’ (ours was Jim, of course), while on the right end sits ‘Tambo’ with a tambourine (almost anyone would do). And all the performers have ‘blacked-up’ faces to represent slaves. The white ones do, any road, and they put white gloves on to save blacking up their hands.

  Easy enough to do, blackface, Horrie, should you fancy giving it a try. There’s only an amateur minstrel troupe in every suburb of Melbourne and about a hundred professionals to compete with. Burn five corks to a crispy black ember, wait until they cool completely, crumble them into a jar, add mutton fat, stir together. In England it freezes solid but in Australia if you lose one of those for a week in the baggage I wouldn’t advise taking the lid off ever again. Even whiffier than scenery cloths in the sun. Scenery is sealed with rabbit glue, Horace, there’s an unglamorous inside fact for you.

  I remember the first time we met Irving Sayles. Little Cissie stood on a chair in the dressing-room after the performances and tried to rub Irving’s burnt cork off his cheeks. ‘Blimey, you’re grimy!’ she said. He explained gently to her that his blackness was part of him, and came all the way from Chicago. She was thrilled. ‘Ain’t you the lucky ducky,’ she patted his arm. ‘You’re already done for the next time, Mr Irvie.’

  Irving had a special way of looking at it all: he had been a slave baby himself and grew up with the gospel songs he preferred to sing. He said the audience thought it was laughing at the antics of the stupid, vain black folk, but the black folk who behaved that way were mimicking the behaviour of the white bosses. White folk pretending to be black folk pretending to be white folk. So in the end, Irving said, the white folk were just laughing at themselves, and never knew it. Oh Horrie, you have to go and see Irving. The best acrobat-comedian Australia ever saw, though a little slowed in recent years.

  Harry plucked Irving out of the Hicks Sawyer troupe as soon as his contract was up. Irving had come out with them to Australia as a boy, and he played in the first baseball game in th
e colony at St Kilda in the 1870s. They had another one as a publicity razzle soon after we all arrived from London in 1888, and that’s where I saw Harry’s eye at work. He could always pick a singer out of a chorus or a comic out of a variety bill. He and Kate watched Irving lope gracefully about the baseball field, stopping to play a note on a trombone he’d hidden in the grass, on his way to making the catch, or coming into shortstop and using his derby hat instead of a glove.

  The manager, Mr Hicks, was calling out to the crowd: ‘All these gen-you-ine Negroes,’ he drawled, ‘are performin’ nightly at the Royale Thee-yayt-ter’ in Bourke Street. ‘Genuine Negro?’ called Irving. ‘I’m made of licorice, sir!’ and performed a standing back-flip. I saw Kate and Harry exchange a glance, and knew that as soon as Mr Hicks’s contract with him ran out, Irving would frontflip directly into whatever Harry was doing.

  You wouldn’t think of it but Irving and our Alice were thick as thieves from the moment they met. One day on the balcony of his boarding house overlooking the Carlton Gardens, she put down her lemonade to show him a clog dance from Lancashire. Irving joined in with a Juba flatfoot dance and in an instant, they were doing exactly the same rhythm together, feet flying. From opposite sides of the world, the dance was just the same. Just people with no money and no props making something happen with only themselves. That’s why tramp comedians use props like buckets, and brooms, and bones. Everyone’s got them, or knows what they are.

  Irving’s worked for Harry for more than twenty years now, still on the Tivoli circuit. A lot of the old jubilee singers and comedians didn’t want to go back to the way they’re treated in America – the way natives are treated here. You’ll have noticed, I’m sure, that a lot of oyster bars are run by ‘genuine Negroes’ – retired from the stage. Probably because you don’t need much, just a big pot and some newspaper to serve ’em on. And now they can’t go anywhere, you see: genuine Negroes, not oysters, I mean. If they leave Australia these days, the White Australia laws won’t let them back in, poor loves. Dear old Hosea Eaton – he broke audience attendance records in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and now he’s selling oyster pies off a cart at Woolloomoolloo. You think there are a lot of oyster bars now, Horrie? In the 1880s you couldn’t stumble in Melbourne without falling into one. Oysters were thrippence a dozen on our first tour, with a beer for breakfast or dinner they were a healthful boost they were, that kept a navvy or a comic singer going until dinner.