Ada Read online

  There was something about those crimson velveteen settees. Everything else in our lives was hard: unyielding mattresses stuffed with horse hair or rustling seaweed; mean, splintery lodging-house kitchen pews. Sinking into those plush Parer’s settees, everyone made a noise like a happy sigh.

  My pal Miss Lillie May Bryer would often be already waiting for us, having come down by tram from Fitzroy, with shrimp paste sandwiches and a pot of tea with extra water already on the table. She’d hold our position in a corner settee and use her dimples to fend off attacking hordes of grim-faced biddies with their hair pulled back tight enough to stop a horse, who fell back, tutting. Then they’d surround us, sitting as straight as spears on their rattan, giving us the evil eye and the lemon-lips every time we laughed. And we laughed a lot.

  Lillie May was my first real pal of my own age, and who wasn’t a Bell. We wrote to each other for years and she never listened to any nasty Marzella talk. It’s hard to have friends while you’re a nomad, so she was important to me. And she understood when I had to go away. She was from the famous circus and theatre family, the Edouin-Lewises. Lillie May was on the stage by the age of six and got the most tepid reviews for years, ranged from grudging to frightful. She bore them stoically and we never referred to them. Like me, she spent a lot of time looking after nieces and nephews. Her family went bang-bust in the 1890s like the rest of us, though Lillie May managed to hold onto the house in Moor Street because her Uncle Willie lets her live there while he manages a little theatre in New York. She came to see me the other day but I could see it upset her. She had those high red spots on her cheeks and couldn’t stop for long.

  It’s peculiar – nice peculiar – how you can be close friends in the theatre. I didn’t see Bob or Lillie May from one year to the other, but we wrote letters, and we understood what was required of a theatrical life. You might say all I’ve got is Lillie May’s photograph and the packet of letters from Bob, but I’ve the memories, too.

  It was always quite the theatrical crowd at Parer’s, all of us spread out across a few tables with big sheets of newspapers, hot chocolates or tea, and plenty of children. As well as us Bells, Harry and Kate were customarily there. Harry would be buttonholing the celebrities and up-and-comers of Melbourne as they passed his table and buying them a coffee, giving House tickets to the chattiest waiters, the ones who let Lizzie play the piano in the south corner while Cissie darted about in the greenery between the tables, which she called the urn-ferns.

  He introduced us to Mr Cole, who runs Cole’s Book Arcade. The man who advertised for a wife and got a good one. The one who invented a new world religion in which black, white and Chinamen are all equal. The man who makes the Cole’s Funny Picture Book all the children love. They say nowadays he’s got a million books in his shop, and eleven monkeys. And Harry presented us girls to Macpherson Robertson – the very one you buy your Pineapple Crunch from, Horace. He used to look at us girls in that way nobody likes: up and down. And across, for that matter. I was coolly inspected, and found wanting, I could tell. Back then, he was just a man with a little sweet shop; now he runs half of the factories in Fitzroy, all turned over to making chocolate rabbits and Peppermint Swizzles and Coconut Puffs, with an army of workers in white coats and fleets of MacRobertson’s trucks.

  And I remember Alfred Sleight the gasometer-shaped Collins Street undertaker, always in black just in case. And Madame Elise, the society seamstress with one wrong eye, always in a little feathery conical hat. And a gaggle of dandies, perhaps the S-shaped Mr Chateaux who was always leaning against the furniture, and Mr Ferne, from London and American Tailoring two doors down, who looked approvingly at himself in every mirror. He had the air of a man who could deny himself nothing. Years later he received thirty-eight votes in the state election, which must have been rather bracing.

  I hadn’t forgotten my responsibilities if that’s what you’re thinking. I always sat on my teapot – by which I mean, I made it last and last. Alice and Jim were always scheming ways to get money back to the Under-the-Table Boys, or get the boys out to us. Alice didn’t have to account to Jim for her walking-around money, but I did. Because my costumes and meals were paid for by Jim as manager and settled directly with drapers or landladies, it was thought I didn’t need much. Sixpence for a pot of tea and a buttered crumpet was delicious luxury. Asking for any more felt like taking it off the boys.

  Jim was depositing half our wages from Harry in a Melbourne bank, and wiring some home each week to his brothers Walter and Charles, who were keeping their eye on the Under-the-Table Boys at a boarding house in Hull. We had almost saved enough for one to come out, but if James junior came on the boat, who would look after the younger ones? And if little Thomas was chosen because he needed his mother the most, who would watch over him on the voyage? In any case, we didn’t have nearly enough yet for half a passage for anyone. So there they stayed, while we felt guilty over every piece of Parer’s toast.

  I still have a postcard Lillie May sent to me when I was in South Africa. I think it’s at the back of the scrapbook somewhere, in a deckled cream envelope. It’s the sweetest picture of her: a riot of haberdashery on her bodice and a homemade tiara atop with tiny birds. She had written on the back, I can recite it even now: ‘May life turn to you its sunny side and Fortune treat you kindly.’ That’s just like her, and all you can hope for, isn’t it, before you go to glory?

  Cissie once asked me, when she was small, what was in Heaven. I said I thought it would be all of us on a Parer’s red settee of a Sunday morning when most other people was in Church. In Parer’s-Heaven we’d be flanked by chatty pals, and ferns, and ever-fresh hot teapots, and plum cake, and Lil would read us something amusing out of the paper. Lizzie would be plonking about on the piano, while the fountain splished away at the same time, and we’d have no show to do until Tuesday. So perhaps that’s where Cissie is now. That’s a nice thought.

  It’s all different here, isn’t it, Horrie? I haven’t a fountain to my name, these days. Just as well – they only make you need to have a tinkle, don’t they? I haven’t even a rug. And you wouldn’t want a wall of mirrors in here unless you fancied a good shrieking. But tea we have. And scones, here’s to your mother. No piano, but I can get up quite a rhythmic coughing now and then. I try to stay cheerful, especially when there are visitors. I do tend to go a bit drifty in the afternoons, I must say.

  Melbourne was maximum fizz. It was a tonic, after the slightly sneering Adelaide reviewers. What is it about Adelaide stage critics, dearie-oh? They don’t like anything. If you were in the best show in the world, and they had to carry out audience members dead from laughing, and as an encore a horse on skates came on and played the piano accordion, the Adelaide critics would review the horse’s eyebrows and find fault with them.

  They’re even worse than the new Australian republicans in Sydney who lurked high in the gods at the back of the theatre and hissed at our songs of Empire and rolled their eyes at Harry’s cockney carry-ons. The Bulletin magazine didn’t want ‘Wotcher, Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road’, it wanted ‘Brandish the Wattle High and Poke a Chinaman in the Eye’. That’s not really a song, though they’d like it to be.

  There was five big cities of the world back then. London, Paris, New York, Chicago – and Melbourne, flush with gold-rush money and a land boom that seemed it would thunder on forever. Timing was everything and we got there in the nick of it.

  We opened at St George’s Hall in Bourke Street, down the hill from Parer’s.

  The night of our debut in Melbourne was the most thrilling of my life until then. I’d been encored three times doing Alice’s skipping dance by the largest audience ever sat before me. And I realised what ‘applause still ringing in your ears’ really meant. I seemed to float home through the zigzag lanes with the others, hardly noticing the mashers we passed, and then I couldn’t sleep for toffee. The middle of the night in our Vic Pal room seemed very dark and very quiet. It was just past three o’clock
by the GPO clock chimes, the girls steady-breathing bundles in the bed. Cissie had one leg over mine, Lizzie’s head was squashing my forearm, and one of them was doing evil puffs of farts, begging your pardon. I’d been going over and over in my mind where the laughs came in the bells mélange when I became aware of a strange sound I couldn’t identify. A sort of shuffling, odd drumbeat.

  I slid out and threw the rug on over my nightdress, dodged the chamber-pot, and wandered along the corridors and through the deserted billiard room out onto the second-floor verandah, which looked down on Collins Street and across to the Queen’s Arcade. I stood with one foot on top of the other on the chilly boards and looked out.

  There was a bit of wind and the better-most of a moon and a million or so new-world stars that I didn’t know the names of, having never seen them before. I looked down, but the street wasn’t there. Instead of the dirty cream-coloured macadam road smeared with horse dirt, there was a field of fluffy, grey-golden clouds, rolling and shimmering, billowing down the street.

  The gas lamps glowed weird circles of jaundice yellow. On the other side of the road, at the edge of the river of clouds in front of The Argus newspaper building, there was a dark figure, a man in a wide coat seated high up on a horse buried to its flanks amid the puffy florets. The man pulled the reins and looked uphill, into the cloud-river. He waved a scrunched dark shape in one hand. I saw his breath in the air. A short, low whistle sounded. For a moment, the gaslight painted him orange cheekbones and a flaming beard as he replaced his hat, and he was a silhouette again.

  A dark creature with pointy horns and a tail, with four skinny legs, shot up through the clouds, bounded across the top of them and then fell back underneath. The clouds around it scattered away and then regrouped. And I saw all in an instant that they weren’t clouds at all, but a mob of sheep on the move, as far as your eye could see, tottering sheep with curly horns, laden with gargantuan whorls of pale-grey wool.

  I leaned over, the iron-lace balcony metal cold against my legs. Down on the Swanston Street corner other men and dogs ranked on two sides to turn the sheep and make them flow hard left, around the corner and towards the river bridge. One stately sheep broke away up onto the opposite pavement with a confused bleat, and was quickly turned back by the black-and-tan dog nipping its heels.

  I waited and watched for perhaps half the hour, even though I began to shiver, until all the sheep and the last of the drovers went by, and finally the road was revealed again, with triddlings of black muck-buttons all along it. In explaining my fatigue the next day, not a soul believed I had spent an hour watching a flock of sheep in the middle of town.

  We tell everyone that we sold tickets as fast as they was printed but really we were just doing ‘all right’. Harry owed money everywhere, and it was hard to find a vacant theatre to book. But somehow everyone was full of optimism and had enough to be going on with. Half the girls of Melbourne were making boots in Collingwood and the other half pranced up and down the pavement in Collins Street in their finest riot-coloured silks, twirling their parasols, ‘doing the Block’. Young men were either making all the other boots or galloping furiously about in gigs bringing flowers to the stage doors. We sat on the Vic Pal verandahs and watched everyone else cram onto the Collins Street trams in their flash duds on their way up to the great Centennial Exhibition.

  The Exhibition buildings covered almost all the Carlton Gardens, giant-domed halls and endless sheds packed with orchestras and inventions and marvels: battery-powered electric lights and magnet cures, obelisks of false-gold ingots, ladies swirling hot-sugar pans to make gob-stopper sweeties, and suits of armour from the Tower of London. Exhibitors demonstrated everything from evaporated apricots to the Viennese harpsichord and in the case of a man called Sydney Cooke, how to hammer in a nail. Outside they had black swans and a switchback railway. We went more than once.

  Even the other visitors were a spectacle. There were beardy, pigeon-chested dullards from the Richmond Volunteer Rifles in blue flannel uniforms with shiny brass helmets and belt buckles. They fired off nothing but sidelong glances at larrikinesses from Gertrude Street, who sported novelty chatelaines and squashed-up hats, trailing gay ribbons and a flash of red petticoats. Their mates were the bold masher boys in ‘eelskin’ trousers – ‘tight enough to cut off the water supply,’ as Jim observed. Some had made themselves cardboard collars, and matching dickies with buttons drawn on: you have to give a prize for effort there, don’t you? They were sharp types. More than once I had to shoot out the other side of the fernery like a cannonball, just by the carp fountain.

  Melbourne smelled like an outhouse, but if you shook some eucalyptus oil on your hanky she was beautiful – even the buildings seemed full of ease, with generous porticos and gracious wide stairs in the honey-coloured local stone forever bathed in golden light. Everything had extra decoration: wrought-iron ‘walks’ on the top of shiny zinc and copper rooves, arched windows with gargoyles on the upper corners, windowsills wide enough to sit on and swing your legs.

  Kate and I used to stroll down to the Public Library and picture gallery, and loll about in the Reading Room, tracing new sleeve patterns out of the tailoring periodicals.

  The theatres in Bourke Street blasted out a wall of new electric light all the way up to the raucous shenanigans at the Eastern Market, with its sausage sellers and thimble-rigging swindle merchants and buskers with tubas and cellos and drums, amateur acrobats and bunches of tussy-mussy staggered up the florist stands, and coffee carts lit with candle stubs under a sieve, all the trollies and crannies crowded. There was snatches of song, chatter and haggling in ten languages, bottles clankering about in crates and the glister from thousands of crushed oyster shells in the gutter.

  Inside, the Eastern Market was a village roofed in high arches of shiny zinc, hugger-mugger gas-lit shop windows with little crooked passages between, obelisks with mirrored sides, beckoning clairvoyant crones and spiritualist materialisation photographers, electro-magnetic bathhouses, wire workers and purveyors of speaking tubes. It smelled of people, hot nuts, chained marmosets, and the upstairs stables. It’s a lot more staid, now, sadly.

  Back then you could tell if a man was a new arrival fresh docked in the bay or the river: they’d still be huffing on about the scandalous brightness of Melbourne ladies’ gowns – marigold, sky blue, arsenic green, the new ‘electric’ violet, and a new, fast red that an Argus letter writer complained had given him scarlet fever. Young couples strolled further up Bourke Street to the Fitzroy Gardens and – shall we say – lingered to admire the forms of the mortar statues. I might have had a good look at them once myself.

  Everyone was after a good time. They all came to see us at St George’s Hall every night: the outdoor labourers with their burned red necks, and the servants on their half-day, and the country visitors exhausted from a day of gaping at things but rousable if you let Harry at them with a song. Most of them had heard tell of the morals of a theatre girl so they’d arrange themselves outside the stage door and make incomprehensible suggestions. I wasn’t allowed out unless I was going home with Harry or Jim, though I managed it a few times.

  The best part about the Vic Pal Hotel was that it backed onto Little Bourke Street, so you could dash out the back and zigzag down the lanes onto Bourke Street where the theatres were. You could get from St George’s Hall to our lodgings under cover of darkness in about three minutes sharp, whipping yourself past the stage-door johnnies. ‘Goldfish’ was their other name – always gaping at us, you see, steeped in Cologne-water but smelling underneath of onions and tobacco. It’s funny, scent, isn’t it? If I caught a whiff of onions, smoke and bay rum now I could close my eyes and see a clutch of moist-lipped Melbourne Grammar schoolboys in their fathers’ ties, gibboning about at the stage door being cruel to each other. If there were more promising prospects outside the door, some theatrical girls may have tarried to accept a posy, a hat pin, some compliments or even a blameless kiss: the sort of thing that never ha
ppened to Marzella, mind you.

  It’s never all ease and glamour anywhere, is it? If you get a fingernail onto the surface of any riches and splendour and scrape away quietly you’re bound to see something a bit nasty underneath. For every wide Melbourne boulevard full of striding captains of industry (and sheep) there’s a back lane behind, from where their shit is carted – oh, I do beg your pardon. It’s the morphia, you know.

  Any time of the day you might look up Little Bourke Street and see it crowded with celestials in pointy Chinese hats, blue tunics with black pants, twirling blue parasols or waving red ducks on sticks. At the top end the ginnels and snickets off Little Lonsdale Street, near parliament, made up the crazed ‘sink’ area: plenty of places to buy time with a bold girl, or have your pocket picked or be shouted at by lairising groups of larrikins, who picked pockets in summer and spent much of the winter burgling.

  The lanes was where the detectives from the new novels came to, in order to solve their murders by talking to filthy-tongued harridans, and cretinous servant women who shrieked and threw aprons over their heads, and motionless heirs in opium dens – not to mention galloping hordes of loyal decent young ladies who would never set foot in such a perfectly ghastly place was it not for the pure love of their wrongly accused sweetheart, and thankfully all the while the detective speaks his thoughts aloud so we can see his genius machinations in between exclamations of ‘Hulloah!’. You’ve read The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, surely. We’ve read all the thriller novels, the yellower the cover the better.

  Melbourne’s wide boulevards were the front garden everyone saw but even those could be eccentric. Back then, Collins Street traffic had to go around a gargantuan obstacle in the middle of the road, a statue of both its tragic inland explorer heroes, Burke and Wills. Two greater fools would be impossible to find. And yet there they stood, three times life-size in bronze on a plinth the size of a small house. After dark the two of them gazed benignly in the wrong directions while queues of late-night mashers and drunks in wide-awake hats widdled away underneath them.